


my high hopes are getting low

by pastel_paperclips



Series: Draco Malfoy and the Road to Redemption [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 5+1 Things, Abortion, Awkward Crush, BAMF Astoria Greengrass, Bad Decisions, Battle of Hogwarts, Bigotry & Prejudice, Blaise Zabini is a Good Friend, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Childhood Friends, Childhood Trauma, Crushes, Crying, Detention, Developing Friendships, Discussion of Abortion, Duelling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Family Bonding, Father Figures, Female Friendship, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Good Slytherins, Gryffindor vs. Slytherin Rivalry, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Fifth Year, Hogwarts Fourth Year, Hogwarts Seventh Year, Hogwarts Sixth Year, Hogwarts Third Year, Hugs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kinda, Loss of Parent(s), Lucius Malfoy's A+ Parenting, Magical Realism, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Mentor Minerva McGonagall, Muggle/Wizard Relations, Not Beta Read, Oblivious Draco Malfoy, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Third Person, Pansy Parkinson is a Good Friend, Parent Death, Platonic Cuddling, Protective Blaise Zabini, Protectiveness, Pureblood Culture (Harry Potter), Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Pureblood Society (Harry Potter), Rating May Change, References to Canon, Revenge, Severus Snape Has a Heart, Sexuality Crisis, Sibling Love, Slytherins Being Slytherins, Step-parents, Supportive Narcissa Black Malfoy, Teacher-Student Relationship, Teenagers, Unhealthy Relationships, Unplanned Pregnancy, Unreliable Narrator, it starts in third year and goes up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26044006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pastel_paperclips/pseuds/pastel_paperclips
Summary: 5 times Draco Malfoy helped his friends and one time he let them help him.OR: Draco Malfoy and his housemates through the years.
Relationships: Astoria Greengrass & Daphne Greengrass, Astoria Greengrass & Draco Malfoy, Daphne Greengrass & Draco Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Blaise Zabini, Draco Malfoy & Minerva McGonagall, Draco Malfoy & Moaning Myrtle, Draco Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Pansy Parkinson, Draco Malfoy & Pansy Parkinson & Blaise Zabini, Draco Malfoy & Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy & Theodore Nott, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Gregory Goyle & Draco Malfoy, Gregory Goyle/Daphne Greengrass, Millicent Bulstrode & Draco Malfoy, Millicent Bulstrode & Pansy Parkinson, Millicent Bulstrode & Tracey Davis & Daphne Greengrass & Draco Malfoy & Theodore Nott, Millicent Bulstrode/Pansy Parkinson, Tracey Davis & Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe & Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe & Gregory Goyle, Vincent Crabbe & Gregory Goyle & Draco Malfoy & Pansy Parkinson & Theodore Nott & Blaise Zabini
Series: Draco Malfoy and the Road to Redemption [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890556
Comments: 13
Kudos: 67





	1. Third Year: Tracey Davis

**Author's Note:**

> title from [yungblud's parents](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOWBsmgjmPo)
> 
> and finally [a playlist :)](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/17CDnqG9CNkkGnKU232zkJ)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 1: [turn the lights off](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLrdSC9MVb4) by Tally Hall
> 
> and a summary of Azkaban if you need a recap
> 
> dementors arrive on the train, in Hagrid's first lesson he presents hippogriffs and draco baits Buckbeak, getting slashed (when he shows back up in potions he mentions black and his connection to the potters to Harry, to Harry's confusion), lupin shows them a boggart in their first defence lesson, sirius black breaks into the castle, a few weeks later they go to Hogsmeade before Christmas and after malfoy provokes ron, harry protects him with the cloak, buckbeak loses the first trial and Hermione punches draco after he insults hagrid. this is followed by their end of years and buckbeak's appeal failing: he'll be executed. Harry, Ron and Hermione do the big time travel- hippogriff- Sirius Black- werewolf adventure. Snape tells the Slytherins about Lupin's werewolf status and Lupin resigns before the end of the year.

_Don't go in there_

_You'll become one_

_Freaky creatures_

_Monster party_

_..._

_Bend the nightmare_

_You control it._

“And don’t get me started on the French!” Pansy exclaimed. “I swear, the next time some half-blood tells me I’m wrong I’ll snap their wand myself!”

“Sounds riveting, Pans,” Nott murmured, examining one of his cloak buttons. “I’ve no idea why people disagree with you.”

She scoffed, flouncing off to complain to one of the Ravenclaw girls in their year. Nott met Draco’s gaze and grinned. The blonde didn’t react, staring up the path at the steady stream of lights leading to the carriages.

“Still can’t believe my dad didn’t tell me about the dementors,” Goyle said gloomily, trying to balance all of the trunks they’d passed on to him. Zabini rolled his eyes, striding past them with the Greengrass girl in tow. 

“Yours must’ve,” Nott nudged Draco, and he started, focusing back on the conversation. “What doesn’t Lucius Malfoy know?”

Draco smiled slightly, finally looking at him. “Nothing.” 

Goyle grunted, looking close to pouting like some Hufflepuff first year. “So why didn’t mine tell me?”

There was a flurry of giggles ahead of them, Pansy clearly proud of herself while the other girls cooed. Bulstrode looked slightly uncomfortable, hovering on the edges of their group.

“You know, he likes me more than my brother, so he really should have,” Goyle persisted.

Draco zoned back out: the stars were gleaming over the village and from here, he could see the lights of The Three Broomsticks twinkling merrily down the street. Zonko’s was closing for the day, and he could hear a few older students chatting happily down the trail. It really was quite beautiful in a quaint way he supposed. The lilting buildings and timber beams reminded him of the French villages he’d visited with his mother when he was younger. He felt himself start to smile.

“Found one!” Crabbe called, bringing Draco back to the present, He was grinning back at them from further up the path, standing proudly next to a carriage. 

“Finally,” Pansy sighed, pushing herself up and abandoning Bulstrode with the Ravenclaws.

Nott ground to a stop, staring up at empty air, eyes wide. 

“Alright?” Goyle asked, nudging him from his seat.

“There’s a horse,” the other boy finally managed. “There-” he gestured at the air. “It's…” 

Draco moved to stand by his side. “I don’t see anything.”

The others settled into the carriage, Pansy moaning for them to hurry up.

“What does it look like?” he asked curiously.

Nott shrugged. “A horse.” he wrinkled his nose. “An ugly horse.” He shook his head and swung himself up, offering his hand. “Come on, Draco.”

The blonde nodded, still staring at the patch of air. For a moment, he could see the faint mist of breath emerge from the nothing. Turning, he brushed Nott’s hand aside, stepped into the carriage and they were off.

The common room was as cold as it had always been and the chill reminded Draco of the distant rooms in the Manor he wasn’t allowed in yet. The fireplaces were lit, but the flames were devoid of any warmth. Pansy gasped, dragging him over to where a tall girl with a high ponytail and light brown skin was playing with a toad. 

She was sprawled over the antique rug next to Crabbe with a carelessness that told Draco all he needed to know about her upbringing. He could list five materials the threads were crafted from, and at least three of them were from protected and depleting sources. She kicked her leg out, crusted mud falling onto the rug. 

“Tracey!” Pansy swept the half-blood into a hug, practically shoving Draco into a sofa opposite them. Zabini and Nott followed and soon enough, the rest of their year managed to find themselves hovering near their group. Greengrass and Bulstrode were giggling over the Ravenclaw Quidditch team by the fireplace, Greengrass significantly more so than Bulstrode. Carefully, Goyle tried to squeeze himself into an armchair, the wood groaning in protest. The half-blood on the floor was still smearing mud over the rug.

Davis would give his mother a heart attack, he decided, her shoes scuffed and her nail polish chipping away onto the shiny floors. “That’s what I’m saying!” she threw her head back, high ponytail swinging until it hit his knee. “Draco, what are you thinking?”

“Don’t talk to me,” he muttered, and she snickered, slapping his knee playfully. There were moles scattered across her neck in the loose pattern of Ursa Major. He watched them shift over her skin as she laughed at a crude joke Crabbe had made.

“She has a point, Malfoy,” Zabini leaned in slightly. “Any thoughts?”

“What does your father think?” Bulstrode cut in. Her hair had grown over summer, brushing the bottom of her tie.

“My opinions are not open for discussion,” he waved a hand at them, and Bulstrode scoffed to herself. No one in this room was trustworthy, he reminded himself. Not even Pansy. “It’s none of your business.”

“What do you think of Hagrid?” Zabini pushed again. “He is a half-giant after all.”

“We don’t know that,” Greengrass chimed in, hazel eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t assume things.”

“He’s still quite large though,” Goyle interrupted. “Can’t be natural. Can it?” he turned to Draco, who shook his head, thinking that Goyle was the opposite of self-aware, currently trapped in a too-small armchair.

“Maybe an Enlargement Charm went wrong?” Davis considered, examining her wand. “They aren’t sustainable, though. Unless…” she turned to Draco who blanched.

“Don’t. Even. Think about it.”

She rolled her eyes, falling back onto the rug. An unusually large flake of dirt dislodged itself from her shoe into the threads, concealing a small cluster of monkshoods.

“What options are you all doing?” Greengrass tried, smiling at the group. No one answered. “I chose Runes and Divination.” 

Pansy snickered quietly, opening up Nott’s Transfiguration textbook to hex the pages together. 

“Blaise?” Greengrass turned to Zabini, who shook his head at her. Her shoulders fell. “Greg?”

Goyle started, looking up from where he was trying to force himself out of the seat. “Wha’?” 

“Which options are you doing?” she asked again. Goyle went purple.

“Uh, Care of Creatures,” he scratched his head. “And, well,” he glanced at Draco. “Few others.”

“I hope Care’s enjoyable,” she smiled at him. “I’m sure _Professor_ Hagrid,” she frowned at Zabini. “Will be a magnificent teacher.”

“Hardly,” Pansy scoffed, examining her black nails. “I mean, look at Goyle’s textbook!” they all looked at the growling mesh of fur and teeth tied to the table. “He’ll be awful, I know it.”

Greengrass bit her lip. “You should at least give him a chance.”

Pansy laughed. “Daphne, I would give a redcap a chance. I would give a giant the dirt on my boots.” Draco glanced at the mud surrounding Davis.

Goyle took one look at Pansy and lobbed the aforementioned Care of Magical Creatures textbook at her head. 

She _shrieked_ , shoving the thing into the fireplace. 

Goyle’s mouth fell open, and the group watched the fur begin to smoke. The textbook let out a low whine. 

“Is it gonna die?” Bulstrode finally voiced what they were all thinking.

“My mum’s gonna kill me,” Goyle whispered, looking terrified. 

Davis jumped up, peering into the flames. “I think it's still alive.”

“Nice job, Pansy, you made it mad,” Bulstrode hissed. 

Davis’s toad hopped up onto her shoulder, letting out a low croak. She gasped. Draco glanced at Nott who shrugged. Davis turned back to them, ponytail swinging around to nearly hit her in the face. “Does anyone have a big stick?”

The group gaped at her. Well, Draco admitted to himself. Zabini didn’t exactly gape, simply looked adequately ruffled by the events. 

“That abomination,” Pansy seethed, though her steps were slow enough that Draco could keep up even with all of his textbooks hanging off of his right arm. The hippogriff venom was still lazily pumping through his veins, and for a moment, he wondered if he was going to fall over. “That _anathema_.”

Draco wondered if she thought that if she spat her words with enough passion, he wouldn’t notice her tear tracks. 

“You could have _died_ ,” Pansy shook her head. “Imagine! The Malfoy heir _dead_ because some old twat doesn’t know how to hire people who won’t try to kill students! At this rate, I’m half-expecting a teacher to threaten the bloody killing curse!”

“Pansy,” Draco muttered. The gash was closed, but even feeling the skin pull made his head swim. “Potter doesn't know about Black.”

Pansy stopped stamping down the corridors to stare at him in disbelief. “So?”

Draco frowned. “Well-”

“What about Black?” Davis slipped into the conversation. “Nice sling by the way.”

“I’m going to get the giant fired,” Pansy flounced into the Great Hall, head held high. “And it’ll be all his fault.”

Davis glanced at Draco, grinning at him. “Hippogriffs are dumbasses. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I won’t,” he glared at her. She was too loud, and the volume was starting to make his head boil and pound like an earthquake. He wouldn’t be surprised if his brain was rattling. “Go and be unworthy of my time somewhere else.”

She held her hands up, taking a seat next to Bulstrode and grabbing some bread.

“How’s your arm?” Zabini asked without looking at him as Draco sat between Pansy and Nott. 

Draco shrugged, the small motion sending little jolts of aching through his arm. “Been better.”

Greengrass sucked in a breath at the bandages, reaching out a hand before hesitating. “Is this real or Pansy’s idea of revenge?”

“Why can’t it be both?” Pansy challenged, examining her eyelashes in a silver goblet. 

Greengrass sighed. “Don’t get caught.”

Draco tuned them out as they devolved into an argument about Transfiguration and how intent hindered results. So what if Potter didn’t know about Black? He twirled his fork over his fingers, gazing out at the faint moon, miles and miles above him. To be honest, he’d quite like to know that the mass-murderer-currently-on-their-way-to-kill-him knew his parents though that made him think about the mass murderers his parents _did_ know, and suddenly he felt faintly ill.

 _There was a picture on the mantelpiece in the music room, half-covered in dust and its silver frame spotted with age. He’s an infant, covered in green silks and cradled in his aunt’s arms. His father had engraved it with the words_ familia ante Omnia, _and whenever he thought of it, all he could see was the half-crazed smile on his aunt’s face as she rocked him. If he was ever hypnotised, Draco imagined it would feel like that: a slow rocking back and forth in the parody of comfort._

Zabini clapped. “And that’s why in the end, his actual performance was entirely adequate while the outward appearance remained unremarkable.”

Davis snorted into her soup. “Reckon that’s what McGonagall says in bed?”

Crabbe laughed so loudly he knocked Bulstrode’s cup over.

“Who would like to go first?” Lupin offered, gesturing to the wardrobe. Nott raised his hand, and Lupin nodded at him, moving aside for him to have a clear shot at the Boggart.

Despite himself, Draco sat up, curious as to what would appear. “Now you will all have to face it, as there are only ten of us, so make sure that image of both fear and humour is clear in your mind!”

“Ten galleons on it being his father,” he heard Pansy whisper. (The bet was a fair assumption after the death of Nott’s mother over the summer and the whispers that had followed.)

Lupin nodded at Nott and opened the wardrobe wordlessly. An intimidating old man strode out, clad in dark robes and cradling a silver mask. Droplets of blood were coating his fingers.

Behind Draco, there was a clink of coins.

“Riddikulus,” Nott flicked his wand, and his father tripped over his robes, ageing centuries in seconds until the boggart was nothing but dust. Nott cracked a small smile, and Draco saw Lupin’s eyebrows reach his hairline.

“Millicent!” the professor called.

She stepped forwards, and the dust whirled into a tall mirror, covering half the classroom and becoming inescapable. Draco could see Pansy subtly check her hair behind him.

“Riddikulus!” Bulstrode’s voice trembled slightly but the mirror warped into a pile of red jelly, wobbling and distorting their reflections before falling to the floor with a squelch. Pansy clicked her tongue.

“Tracey!”

The half-blood lifted her wand, and the Boggart shifted to a large snake, rearing back and hissing at her. There was a frightened croak from her robes, and she cooed, lifting a hand to pet her toad. “Uh, riddikulus?”

The snake twisted itself into a large knot, spitting at the group of teenagers.

“Jesus, that looks like a phallus,” Davis closed her eyes, shoulders shaking. “That wasn’t my intention, Professor.”

Lupin just shook his head, smiling slightly. “Greg?”

The boggart shifted through different forms - from a strange necklace for Zabini to a large reptilian creature with glowing eyes for Greengrass to the body of a young boy for Pansy until finally-

Lucius Malfoy rapped his cane on the floor, and this time the silver mask was nestled over his face, expressionless grey eyes observing him from behind the metal.

Draco faltered.

_Funny, funny, Merlin, funny-_

Lucius turned away.

 _Is that what McGonagall says in bed?_ A small voice in the back of his mind whispered.

His father sighed, and Draco was half-tempted to do the same - he couldn’t even do _this_ , what kind of Malfoy was he-

 _Is that what McGonagall says in bed?_

This was why his father never came home on time-

 _Is that what McGonagall says in bed?_

This was why he was always ashamed-

 _IS THAT WHAT MCGONAGALL SAYS IN BED?_

“Riddikulus!” 

A large bed slammed down from the ceiling, McGonagall peering at his father from underneath her spectacles. As they watched, she opened the covers to reveal a short nightdress.

Lupin laughed, sounding strangely delighted and the bedsprings twisted into the full moon, glaring down at him. He didn’t flinch, calmly casting a “Riddikulus!”

The Boggart exploded into wisps of mist, floating to the ground and vanishing into nothing.

“Why a full moon?” Nott whispered to Pansy who hummed, looking thoughtful.

“You think I’m funny,” Davis nudged him as the class sat back down. 

“He thinks you’re a joke,” Pansy remarked snidely, but Davis waived this off, clearly used to Pansy’s insults despite their strange friendship. Lupin watched them interact curiously before clearing his throat. 

“You all get five house points, and I’d like you to read the chapter on Boggarts in your textbook for our next lesson, please. And, if there’s ever anything any of you want to talk about, I’m available.” He said it like it was expected, but Draco wasn’t a Hufflepuff. 

The professor was unnerved by some of their Boggarts, but it wasn’t any of his business. They could manage themselves perfectly fine without help and to imply otherwise was as good at spitting in their faces in Draco’s opinion.

“You’re all free to leave,” Lupin smiled at the class, and Greengrass smiled back. No one else did.

They all filed into the wide corridor and exhaled a collective breath.

“So Lupin’s a werewolf,” Pansy stated, and the others hummed, all pretending they had realised the same thing. Truth be told though, Draco was still focused on why his father had appeared when he’d been having nightmares about monsters since he was born. Goyle tripped over his shoelaces. 

“What?” 

Pansy ignored him, and Greengrass quietly promised to explain it to him later.

“Isn’t that dangerous, though? For us?” Draco wondered out loud, rubbing his arm where the hippogriff venom was still lazily coursing through his veins. “Greyback wasn’t exactly a model citizen.”

Davis shrugged. “I think keeping a basilisk in the basement is dangerous, but what would I know?” He snorted quietly, and she grinned at him. 

“I’m sure Dumbledore has it under control,” Nott reassured them, Zabini just quietly observing as he walked next to Greengrass.

Davis frowned for a second before cackling, clutching her stomach until she was bent over. An older Ravenclaw boy glared at them. “Oh my god,” she wheezed, wiping away a tear. “We’re so stupid.”

“Trace?” Pansy prompted, wrinkling her nose at not being let in on a joke. Davis nodded, still giggling.

“Lupin’s- Lupin’s called-” she started laughing again. “ _Lupin_!” Goyle looked at Crabbe who shrugged at him. “Christ guys, it means wolf!”

Pansy’s mouth fell open, and Nott blinked.

“You’re shitting,” Bulstrode replied eloquently, and Greengrass practically gasped at the words. Davis fell into another fit of laughter, and Draco found himself smiling slightly with her, if only at the surrealness of it all.

“What’s his first name?” Greengrass asked, clearly intrigued.

Draco frowned, trying to think back to his timetable. “Remus?”

Davis looked at him in disbelief. “Jesus Christ,” she wheezed, letting out another guffaw. “Fucking Remus!”

“Is there a reason you’re calling my colleague's name so vulgarly, Miss Davis?”

They all froze, bar Zabini who smiled into his hand, clearly aware of the teacher longer than any of them had been.

Davis slowly turned to see Professor Flitwick standing behind them, trying to look innocent. The tears of laughter streaming down her face didn’t help. “Not really.”

He raised an eyebrow. “10 points from Slytherin for language. Try not to do it again.” She nodded awkwardly. “And 20 points to Slytherin for that marvellous Charms essay,” he smiled at Greengrass who flushed and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, ignoring Davis’ slightly aggressive thumbs-up.

“And finally, Miss Granger with Miss Patil and Miss Davis with Mr Malfoy,” Vector announced, folding up the roll of parchment. Draco could already feel a headache lurking at the back of his mind. “This is a project that should take you the rest of the year, so do space out your work. You’ll need to keep in touch with your partner throughout the year, and your final grades will rely on your teamwork.”

Davis leant back in her chair to wink at him. Draco’s frown deepened. 

“You’ll spend this lesson discussing the possible focuses of your projects, make sure it's on a specific culture or country, but this will be the only lesson you get on it, the rest you will have to produce in your own time. Go,” Vector gestured, pushing up her glasses to rest in her hair and settling back into her desk with a warm mug of something Draco was convinced was alcoholic. 

Davis’s books clattered into his table as she made herself comfortable. “I’m gonna be the best goddamn partner you've ever seen,” she grinned down at him. Draco rolled his eyes, pulling his supplies closer to himself. He felt like just being in her vicinity would be enough to damage them beyond repair.

“Oo!” she clapped, and pink sparks exploded out of her wand like it was a part of her. Draco’s wand had never done that, but he supposed it might have been beneath him. “What if we focus on the whole Mesopotamian origin of magical astronomy and how that influenced later Arithmancy? Or the smaller hidden islands in the Southern Pacific which guard their borders using Arithmancy-influenced wards? Or how muggles started to uncover magical artefacts and managed to contain them without inciting curses?”

She glanced around them, eyes narrowed.

“I think that Hufflepuff’s doing it on India so we can’t do that,” she whispered, and Draco sighed. “I kinda want it to tie into the practice of curse-breaking so I can do more research, but it's up to you too!”

“ _You’re_ going to be a curse breaker?” Draco asked against his will. Davis was a half-blood and Draco had never heard of a curse breaker being less than pure.

“I might be a Healer,” she mused, flicking through their textbook. Across the room, Granger gasped, drawing away from the Gryffindor girl she’d been partnered with. “We’re fourteen! We can worry about careers and the future later,” she finally landed on a neat double-page spread of the border between France and Spain, several villages circled. “You’re French, right?”

“Half,” Draco acknowledged, glancing over the information. (Part of him was still sniffing at the assumption that he was fourteen but then he realised that that meant she was older than him too and he nearly growled at losing any more ground against her, even in something as juvenile as that.)

_There are several small covens along the Southern French coast which draw on the earth’s natural elements for their magic, typically making potions to conserve their youth and charming their borders against threats. These are notable in their liberal use of Arithmancy to look out for any critical events in their near future. One particular village was also the birthplace of famed alchemist Nicolas Flamel, the creator of the Philosopher’s Stone. It is believed that he first became inspired in this pursuit by the life-extending spells employed by the various covens. Still, as there is little specific information available, this has been impossible to confirm._

“We can do this,” Davis nodded, more to herself than anyone else. “With my brains and your beauty, she’ll have no choice but to give us an O,” she laughed, raising her hand. Draco stared at her, and she stared back, slowly lowering her hand. “Ok, no high-fives,” she muttered. “Meet me in the library tonight?”

“Davis,” Draco sighed. “I cannot think of anything I’d rather do less.”

“Meet another hippogriff?” she winked at him. “Come on, Malfoy. It might even be fun.”

Fortunately, their meeting had to be postponed with the arrival of Sirius Black and the upheaval that followed.

Soon after, the full moon hit and half the Slytherins made sure to avoid the Defence corridors like their lives depended on it, which really, Draco reasoned with himself, they did. Unfortunately, this led to Snape treating them to an extremely in-depth lesson on werewolves which, while entertaining, would do nothing to prepare them for the end of years that felt like mere minutes away.

The next Defence lesson after that, Lupin let them off the werewolf essay, and Greengrass relaxed, Nott rolling his eyes and Davis looking inches away from bursting back into hysterics. 

Like most things, Draco’s gaze wandered from its original focus. There was a short first-year standing alone in the corner of the common room against a loose circle of laughing sixth years. There was always something spiteful about sixth years, Draco thought. Like all the stress and pressure from the years had built itself into a volcano of spitting and seething.

The first year wasn’t crying, but it was a near thing, lip trembling and face red. Draco narrowed his eyes, quill drooping over his Ancient Runes essay before recognition nudged him.

“So whose tie did you steal, mudblood?” a girl Draco recognised from the summer galas asked, face twisted in malice. “I heard mudbloods slaughter for magic. Maybe we should return the favour,” she tapped her wand against his shoulder mockingly.

“He probably cried until the hat gave in,” a boy muttered and the first year screwed their face up.

“That’s not true-”

One of the boys from the Quidditch team shoved him into the wall, laughing at his whimper. Draco made sure he didn’t look away: he might need to do this when he was in the sixth year, to protect their house against thieves.

He knew, logically, that mudbloods had managed to sneak their way into Slytherin for years but seeing it was… different. His father had always preached the sanctity of their house, the prestige and elegance. This short kid, with his hair in a crumpled bun and snot gathering in his nose over the green tie, felt the furthest thing from sacred.

“I heard Black _ate_ one of the Potter’s friends,” Crabbe whispered eagerly, pulling Draco’s attention back to the people he’d have to deal with for the next four years. “All he left was two bony fingers!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it was a simple shattering curse,” Nott pointed out, putting aside Crabbe’s box of chocolate frogs. “Either way, it was a very stylish exit.”

“People died,” Greengrass snapped, slamming her Divination textbook shut. “You should have some respect!”

“I wonder why he didn’t come back as a ghost,” Davis wondered out loud, ignoring Greengrass. “Most people wrongfully murdered do.”

“Who would want to stay on this earth longer than they have to,” Pansy sneered, twirling her wand lazily through a shimmering black gloss. 

“Does anyone want to play exploding snap?” Goyle burst out, clearly louder than he had been expecting. He began to turn red. 

“Malfoy, take responsibility for your minions and teach them to be subtle,” Zabini arched an eyebrow. Goyle glared at him. “This crush is-”

“Shut up, Zabini,” Davis interrupted, chin raised. The atmosphere around the group shifted decisively: Slytherins _never_ revealed secrets for no reason, even if they were more obvious than Lockhart’s Valentine’s robes had been last year. “I’ll play with you Greg,” she smiled at him, and Goyle smiled back, glancing at Greengrass before going red again.

The nine of them were squeezed onto two sofas and an armchair. Pansy sat sandwiched between the other girls (though Bulstrode was perched on the arm and the whole thing looked dangerously close to tipping over), Draco lounged next to Nott with Crabbe on the taller boy’s other side, and Goyle was on the floor, laying out his cards. Zabini was already back to ignoring them all, folded into the chair.

The thing about the seating in the Slytherin common room was that, like most things, it was a game. By the time his father had been in his seventh year, he had gathered six sofas and four chairs, Draco remembered from the photo on the mantelpiece of the music room. Draco would do better. On the surface, you could simply summon a chair or transfigure a sofa from a discarded shoe, but that would be cheating (or at least cheating more than a Slytherin would already do). By merely glancing over the room, Draco could see that the sixth years held the most, but that was only because the seventh year was fragmented and split into different groups.

Davis’s toad crawled over the rugs to lounge by the fire, with brown spots over its back like a cheetah and spikes decorating its leathery skin. As Draco watched, it crouched down and flopped over in the cold, going completely still.

Goyle and Davis were playing exploding snap, and the others had separated into three different conversations. 

The common room was barely decorated, just a few floating lights and evergreen garlands adorning the stone walls and ceiling; it was nothing compared to the majesty of the Great Hall and the spruces lining the grounds. If it wasn’t for the snow and cheap wrapping paper Bulstrode was fiddling with, it wouldn’t have felt like Yule at all.

They’d been back from Hogsmeade for less than an hour but Draco already wanted to go back (if anyone had asked him though, he would have mocked the peasant activity and muttered about how unevolved it was compared to the magical marketplaces in India - once his mother had managed to get him a garnet vine, one he still had curled around his headboard as it fed off the house’s magic to remain alive without its parent plant. Absent-mindedly, Draco wondered if he would ever be able to do that.). 

Thinking of Hogsmeade made him think of Potter and his stupid invisibility cloak trick, and he glared down at his parchment, stabbing his quill into his paper just a little firmer than was necessary. 

A few minutes later, Bulstrode swore. “Uh, Tracey, your toad’s-”

“Alive,” Davis said without looking up. She tapped her wand against the table, squinting down at her cards and the toad croaked. “Stop playing,” she reached across to scratch his back, and the toad shuffled closer.

“Have you started on the essay outline?” Draco asked, shuffling through his parchment to find one covered in vague ideas and thoughts for their Arithmancy project. “You need to have it done for February, and I’ll work on the practical aspects over the holidays-”

“I got it,” she waved a hand at him, slamming down a card and snickering at Goyle’s curse. “Can’t guarantee how much I’ll get done over Christmas though, my dad doesn’t deal much with magic anymore.”

Draco frowned before a loud cackle dragged his attention to where the first year mudblood was stumbling up to his dormitory, trying to cover up his sobs.

The third years looked away, discomfort descending over them.

Slowly, they all went back to their conversations, chair and sofas just ever so slightly separated.

Unsurprisingly, with his return to Hogwarts, came the return of Pansy’s efforts to get Hagrid fired. Also unsurprisingly, she was succeeding.

Over Yule, a ministry representative had called into the manor and looked over his arm, confirming the presence of Hippogriff venom and its lingering effects. He’d been told to avoid excessive blood loss for around the next decade so that the toxin wasn’t exposed to the air, letting it attach itself permanently to his magical signature. Given that excessive blood loss wasn’t something Draco was planning to take part in, he ignored it.

“You’re looking chipper,” Nott noted as breakfast began.

“Of course,” Pansy smiled, buttering a fluffy white roll. “Spring’s coming in.”

“And spring feels like dead hippogriff?” Zabini asked blandly. Pansy’s smile turned razor-sharp. There was grey wool spotting her robes from her new scarf, but to Draco, it looked a lot like ash.

“Precisely.” 

“Hagrid might win the trial,” Nott remarked, thanking Greengrass as she passed him some fruit. “I heard Granger helped him with his defence.”

Draco looked up. 

“And Lucius Malfoy is leading the attack,” Pansy rolled her eyes. “Power lies in the rich, darling,” she winked. “Besides, Macnair is a family friend and my relatives have hunted creatures like hippogriffs for centuries!”

“I didn’t know that Pans,” Greengrass murmured, frowning at her. “I’m sorry-”

“Because you can’t stomach it?” she laughed, high and thin like screeching a bow across a violin. “Don’t apologise for ineptitude.”

“Empathy isn’t ineptitude,” Davis defended, resting her elbow on the table and downing some peach yoghurt. “But Daph’s got a point; I thought you liked Care? At least before Hagrid took it.”

Pansy flushed, an ugly red creeping up her cheekbones. “Watch it.”

Davis sighed, reaching across to squeeze her shoulder. Draco would never understand their friendship. “I’m with you on this one though. The animal was dangerous.”

“Malfoy approached it!” Greengrass burst out before realising what she’d said. “I meant - Malfoy-” she looked at him, eyes wide. “It isn’t black and white,” she whispered. “The creature didn’t know what it was doing.”

“Hippogriffs are incredibly intelligent animals,” Zabini, in his usual manner, made things worse. “They possess the same amount of cognition as the average twenty-year-old wizard.”

“I’m leaving,” Greengrass sighed, standing up from the bench. “I’ll see the rest of you in Herbology.”

“Wait!” Goyle shoved himself out of his seat, accidentally grabbing Crabbe’s bag in his haste. “Uh, I’m,” he stumbled over his feet to join her. “How was that, you know, the old…”

Their voices trailed off as they left the Hall, Goyle staring down at Greengrass like she was a selkie.

“I’m just sick to death of that giant abomination,” Pansy muttered, tearing into her bread with a new ferocity. “The sooner Hagrid’s gone, the sooner-” she cut herself off with a click of her tongue.

“Once the trial’s over, it’ll all be sorted,” Draco told her in that certain way his father did.

“What happened to your cheek?” 

Draco froze before whirling around.

“Why are you in the boys' bathroom?”

Davis blinked at him curiously. “Daph’s crying in the girls. I’m no good with feelings so I thought I’d just piss in here.”

“Why’s she crying?” he asked, back to dabbing cold water over the bruise.

Davis shrugged. “Some Gryffindor fifth year.”

She was still watching him from the doorway; ink somehow staining her ears. Her toad was perched by her Slytherin badge, he noticed belatedly. It croaked at him, and she cooed.

“He says hi!”

“How nice to have a toad with more manners than you,” Draco drawled. The purple mark was still visible. Come to think of it, he had no idea what Davis’s toad was called.

“He says thank you,” Davis grinned. “And that he likes your hair.” Draco glared at her, and she snickered. “Do you want me to sort that for you?” she gestured to his face. “I’m pretty good at Healing, I looked into it after the hippogriff incident. And I won’t even ask who punched you.”

“No one punched me,” he scoffed. “It was,” she smiled at him. “Just some discolouration from a potion.” 

“Bullshit,” she corrected smoothly. Her toad croaked in agreement. “Quite,” she scratched him.

“What’s it called?” Draco muttered quickly, praying she didn’t hear him.

“Aw, he’s called Houdini!” she grinned.

Draco blinked at her.

“He was a great magician, did all sorts of shit with his body - he was an escape artist, that’s the term - and there was this one time where he was like hanging upside down over this crowded street in like a strait-jacket and-”

“Any wizard could escape that,” Draco ignored her, considering writing to his mother for help before quickly dismissing it, his father would be so _disappointed_ , especially if he found out that some stupid little mudblood had defeated his heir _._ For a strange reason, the image of his boggart turning away flashed through his mind. Even stranger though was the cold sensation that followed.

“Draco?” Davis asked quietly, frowning slightly at him. “You still with me?”

“Fix it,” he demanded, raising his chin. Between his slightly heeled shoes and her awful posture, he could almost pretend he was taller. “Now.” 

She beamed.

“Episkey,” she cast, flicking her wand in a strange triangular pattern. His cheek burned before flooding with cold. He caught his gaze in the mirror and clenched his fists. The hippogriff venom in his arm felt like it was curling around his veins and _squeezing_.

“Davis,” he ground out.

“Yes?” she asked. Not for the first time, Draco wondered how the Sorting Hat had ever seen a speck of self-preservation in her.

“I’m bleeding.”

She gasped like she’d only just noticed the red smeared over half of his face. “So you are. I don't know if I can fix that.”

He turned to her, incredulous. “You had better try!” 

She hummed, tapping her wand against her chin. She looked strangely calm. “Only if you tell me who beat you up.”

“No one beat me up!” he hissed. “You said you could fix it!”

“I may have lied,” she shrugged. Her toad lurched as her shoulders bobbed up and down and Draco wondered if toads could vomit. It would only be the second-worst thing to have happened to him today. Merlin, he hated mudbloods. “So,” she sang. “Who was it?” 

Draco’s mind whirred. _Episkey,_ he mused. It sounded relatively simple. He turned back to the mirror and pulled out his wand. “Episkey.”

There was a loud crack followed by a distinct burning-

“Fuck!” Davis yelled, rushing to his side. “Shit, piss, bitch, cunt, dick, ass-” 

“Hello Draco,” a frustratingly familiar voice chimed out, and Draco narrowed his eyes.

“Davis.”

“Before you say anything, I finished the Arithmancy essay and gathered some more sources,” she spread a handful of books out over the library table, covering up the ingredient chart he’d been using for a Potions test. “Shit, is that an OWL paper?” she asked, gazing at the parchment like it was Sirius Black magically transfigured.

“What else would it be?” he sneered at her, slightly offended at her shock. “It’s called preparation.”

“Mate,” she shook her head. “I barely revise for _these_ exams.”

“Which is why you’ll fail,” Draco grumbled. “You’re worse than Crabbe and Goyle.”

“I won’t fail,” she winked at him.

“Because you’ll cheat,” Draco drawled. “Which will be impossible in the OWLs, meaning you’ll fail.”

“They’re in two years,” she shot back. “Plenty of time for me to work out a way to cheat without getting caught.”

Against his will, Draco’s lips twitched up slightly.

“Either way,” she finally sat opposite him, toad, Houdini, Draco remembered, crawling down her arm to rest against a roll of parchment. “I learnt the funniest thing the other day,” she grinned, eyes twinkling. He pulled his test closer to himself, eyeing her elbow and its proximity to his inkwell. 

She tugged her astronomy textbook out of her bag and thumbed through it until she found a detailed old star map. Carelessly dropping it onto the table, she tapped a familiar region with a freshly painted black nail. Draco watched his inkwell wobble. 

“The Draco constellation has many alleged origins.” Draco frowned, interested, despite himself. “Perhaps the 100 headed dragon from Hercules’ 12 labours, or the dragon killed by the ancient Greek wizard Cadmus before founding Thebes.” She leant back in her chair, grinning at him as she swayed forwards and backwards. “Or…” she glanced around the library. “The dragon slain by Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom.” Draco followed her gaze to where Granger was gathering books from an unstable grey shelf.

His eyes widened, flushing, and he slapped her with his test as she cackled, much too loudly for the library. Her elbow flew out, and his inkwell spilt over her star map. 

“Shit!” she cursed, waving it like the ink would simply trail off.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Purgo,” he waved his wand, and the ink faded. She stared up at him, eyes wide.

“Next time you get beat up, you can come to me again,” she offered, and Draco scoffed. 

“I wasn’t beaten up.”

She wrinkled her nose in disagreement. “There was blood.”

“Yeah, from you messing the spell up!” Draco hissed. 

“I messed the spell up?” she guffawed. “Mate, there was _fire_ -”

“Yes, ok,” he gritted out, cheeks flushing pink. “Was that all you wanted, to mock me?”

“Nah,” she waved his comment away, gathering up her books. 

Somehow, she’d managed to collect his Defence homework even though he had been sure it was on the chair next to him. 

She pulled out the parchment and kissed it. “I love cheating.”

“Just ask,” Draco groaned, eying the ink stains on her hands that were smudging over the previously clean paper. He found he didn’t mind it as much as he should have. “How did you even find out about that?” He couldn’t even say it, admit that a mudblood had hurt him.

“Some Hufflepuff saw it and told all his friends.”

Draco’s eyes widened. Merlin, his parents would find out, they’d know that he was an awful son and heir, he wasn’t worthy of the Malfoy name-

“Dickhead move in my opinion,” Davis ploughed on, copying out his homework. “Why did you get redcaps for this and not veelas?”

“Veelas get unbearably jealous when confronted with someone beautiful leading them to attack more often, redcaps are repulsed by it, so they retreat.”

“Then why’d they attack you?” Davis wondered, and Draco’s head snapped up, ready to insult her back before what she’d said dawned on him.

“Shut up,” he muttered, covering his pale hair with one hand. 

She laughed. “Maybe you have veela blood. Would explain your jealousy.”

“I don’t get jealous,” he hissed, good mood disappearing.

She blinked at him. “Draco?”

He didn’t answer, standing up and clearing his books into his bag, snatching a few of the Arithmancy ones she’d selected. “Give me my homework.”

She didn’t move.

“ _Now,_ Davis.”

“Why are you like this?” she asked, sitting back in her chair and shaking her head at him. “Don’t you get tired of being so defensive all the time?”

“I’m not defensive!”

For a second, they just stared at each other, Draco’s eyes twisted into a sneer.

“Now give me the paper.”

She handed it over, biting her lip. “Sorry if I offended you.”

Draco raised an eyebrow.

“I swear, I’ll never understand you lot,” she murmured. Draco frowned at the implication that she was somehow separate from the rest of them. She wore the same tie and ate the same food: what made her so different? “Would it make you feel better if I got you a treacle tart from the kitchens?”

“It's the middle of the afternoon,” he frowned. “How are you going to do that?”

She grinned, gathering up her things. “I’m _prepeared_.”

“This is a disaster,” Greengrass sighed, twirling a frozen feather through the air. “How are we supposed to focus on exams when Sirius Black could still be out there?”

“I heard a fifth-year say they saw him in the Forbidden Forest,” Bulstrode whispered, eagerly putting down her Divination textbook. The rest of their year tuned into the conversation, quills and books ready to be abandoned. “He was drinking unicorn blood!”

“That was Quirrell,” Draco corrected, translating another Runic passage and trading grammatical notes with Davis. (The image of that hooded figure in the forest bent over the unicorn’s corpse, dark magic seeping out from the figure’s very skin still made him shudder.) “Unless Black’s also seeking immortality.”

“Why do all of our conversations lead to discussing life after death?” Nott wondered out loud, and Pansy sniffed.

“Immortality is eternal life; you _don’t_ die-”

“Everyone dies!” Nott protested. “No one lives forever, after a certain point your soul weakens and fractures-”

“Are you stupid?” Pansy snapped and with that, they devolved into a heated argument around the semantics of perpetuity.

Across the room, the mudblood snuck to his dormitory, avoiding the older years and cradling his bag to his chest.

“Do you reckon Black’ll sneak back in before the end of the year?” Davis asked Draco. “Feels like we need some conflict, things are too close to going well.”

“I agree,” Pansy joined in, abandoning her debate with a sneer that told Draco she had started to lose. “Something’s up with that hippogriff situation. The appeal was overturned, but there must be _something_ more.”

“It's strange for Potter and his friends to lose,” Draco realised, and Davis nodded wisely. “That’s all it is.”

“Do you remember last year when you all told me the pipes were just breaking?” Davis wondered.

Draco and Pansy glanced at each other, memories of the faint hissing tracing their minds.

“And it turned out to be a fucking basilisk! Or even first year with all those freaky dead unicorns!

Draco forced down an instinctive shudder: that dead unicorn and the dark magic around it was making his stomach turn which made the hippogriff venom squeeze which made his head _ache_.

“God, this school would be an OFSTED nightmare,” Davis finished, cackling to herself. Bulstrode snorted too, the girls sharing a grin.

Pansy frowned. “Whatever. Theodore, what did you get for this question?”

“Are you ready?” Davis asked, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. Behind them, Draco could hear Goyle yawning as they approached the Astronomy tower. “I’m so excited; I’ve been revising moon patterns and nebula formation for _days_! I mean, I know I failed Transfiguration, but I’ve got this one in the bag, it's always been my best subject, even if I don’t always get Os…” she trailed off with a pout.

Draco scoffed, and she glanced at him.

“What?”

“You’re a _half-blood_ ,” he laughed. “Of course you don’t get top marks.”

She hesitated, smile faltering slightly. “Mate… This is a bad joke, right?”

Draco frowned and the two of them ground to a stop, the other Slytherins walking past, a few glancing back curiously. “You’re a half-blood,” he repeated. “That’s the way things work.”

“Granger-”

“Cheats somehow,” Draco waved her off. “Why are you so surprised?”

“You’re supposed to be my friend! Fuck Draco, I thought you were-” she cut herself off, jerking her head away. “God, I don’t know. Getting better!”

Draco blinked and fell into the past. _“He should be getting better!” his father yelled, or maybe it was his tutor, they had always blurred together when he was younger, tall men with canes often did - “He’s still at the same level,” he slammed a hand into the desk, the loud clang startling Draco from where he crouched under the stairs. “He’ll never defend himself at this rate, too useless-”_

“Why on earth would I ever be friends with a dirty little muggle sympathiser like you?” he spat, whirling on her. “I wouldn’t let you lick my boots with your filthy tongue.”

She clenched her fists, glaring right back. Her wand had started to spark pink again. “Is that _you_ talking? Or the conditioning?”

“Excuse me?” he seethed. “You don’t deserve to speak to me like that. You should show respect, like the inferior witch you are.”

“Millie’s impure too,” she sang. “Yet you seem fine with her.”

“Bulstrode doesn’t act like some kind of muggle trash,” he snarled, and she sighed like she had been expecting something else. _Merlin knew why_ , he thought. _It was her own fault for being a heathen._ The sparks from her wand were landing on the grass around them, leaving perfect burnt brown circles into the green.

“You’re my _friend_!” she asserted, the perfect image of brimstone and fire.

“We’re nothing,” he scorned. 

“Draco, stop pushing people away! I _saw_ your boggart, I’ve heard of your family, but that shit doesn't make you who you are! It's nothing!”

“It's everything!” he yelled, temper spiralling. “And I don’t _care_!” he stormed away before she yanked him back by his sleeve.

“Stop lying you fucking supremacist,” she hissed. “If you’re gonna be a prejudiced cunt, at least do it properly: go on, we’re alone.” she spread her arms, eyebrow raised. “Cruciatus? Imperius?”

“Shut up.” His gaze was fixed on her wand, pointed away from him and into the forest. She wasn’t even scared, he realised. He was _that_ pathetic. Her boggart surfaced at the back of his mind. “You aren’t a real Slytherin. You’re just as much of a disappointment as I am. Let me guess, mummy wanted a nice little Gryffindor? You’re too stupid to be a Ravenclaw, but maybe if you were a Hufflepuff, they’d realise how hopeless you really are.”

She was frozen, staring down at him. He wondered if she still looked at him and saw that constellation.

“You’re the one who’s alone.”

_An image of him barely seven years old being displayed by his tutors in front of his parents as they went through the spells he had learnt like a show pony. Pansy was only allowed to visit him every season; she was learning how to be a lady, his mother said. When they met, she would pour him a delicate cup of tea, and they would sit in the conservatory surrounded by enchanted plants that listened to their every word. Then, Hogwarts and its cramped corridors and the constant feeling of people around you, bickering and laughing and overwhelmingly present._

_The two blurred together into a vision of Draco alone in the Defence corridor, a full moon rising and the school deserted._

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she glared at him. “Stop being the Malfoy heir for five seconds and-” she floundered, biting her lip. 

A bell at the top of the Astronomy tower chimed out, signalling the fifteen minutes before the exam would begin. A cluster of Gryffindors jogged across the path, and he could see Granger muttering comet names to herself. 

Zabini strode up behind them, and Draco blinked, sure he had been in front. “You don’t want to start a fight _here_ , Malfoy,” he smirked, infuriatingly confident. “Try and keep your tragedies separate.”

Some Hufflepuffs were coming towards them, giggling and laughing and-

A wolf howled, deep in the forest-

The laughs were getting closer and-

“Draco,” Davis cut across Zabini. “Just-”

“You’re no better than a _mudblood_!” Draco spat, taking a step back. 

And Davis, smart, funny, confident Davis, her eyes filled with tears.

Her face hardened. “So much for fraternity,” she scoffed, voice cracking slightly. She shoved her elbow into him, storming up the tower steps just in time for the ten-minute bell to ring.

Zabini blinked lazily at him. 

“What do you want?” he sneered. “Are you a mudblood-sympathiser too?”

“You’ll be humbled,” Zabini shrugged elegantly, looking forty to Draco’s fourteen.

Draco felt like he was going to pass out.

_(He failed his Astronomy exam, wrote Scorpio for Orion and called a galaxy a supernova._ ~~_Davis got an Outstanding to his Dreadful._~~ _His father was livid.)_

“They think I don’t belong here! Like it was a mistake!” Draco heard a high voice complain and he slowed down, peeking around the corner to see the mudblood first year with his arms folded petulantly. 

“And was it?” a familiar cold drawl answered and Draco started. _Snape?_

“No!” the first year cried out. “I’m _proud_ to be a Slytherin! Just not that kind,” they trailed off, voice getting quieter. Draco frowned, inching closer to the two. The corridors were practically empty; most people were either in the library or their common rooms. He got a few suspicious looks from older Gryffindors, but they did that to every Slytherin, so he supposed it was normal.

“Slytherins value ambition first and foremost, Mr Harwell. But we are also a house of fraternity, determination and resourcefulness. Tell me, Mr Harwell, are you determined?”

The mudblood sniffed, mumbling a response Draco couldn’t hear. 

“Quite,” Snape droned. “The smartest witch I’ve ever known was a muggle-born.” Draco scoffed. Granger wasn’t _that_ clever. “She would have thrived in Slytherin and so will you.” 

With that, Draco frowned. _Thrived? She was ambitious, anyone who had their sights set on a Ministry job had to be, but she wasn’t ruthless in the traditional Slytherin manner._

“But-”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“No, Professor,” the mudblood muttered.

Snape hummed. Draco snuck another glance around the corner and saw him with his hand on the mudblood’s shoulder. “Children are prejudiced and cruel; some grow up, and some do not. You must-” his voice dropped into a murmur and Draco cursed.

The Fat Friar drifted through the ceiling, chuckling merrily to himself. Draco froze, praying the ghost didn’t notice him. It didn’t work, and the Hufflepuff frowned down at him, ceasing his laughter. 

Draco nodded at him, but the ghost didn’t reply, diving down into the floor with a haughty expression.

“Good,” Snape’s voice picked up again. “Now, wait by my office. There is one more student who requires my attention.”

Draco cursed, quickly moving-

“ _Not_ so fast, Mr Malfoy.”

He stilled, looking back to see Snape with his eyes narrowed.

“I trust you won’t be repeating any of that _private_ conversation to your housemates or father?”

Draco blinked. He hadn’t written to his father in weeks, and he wouldn’t be surprised if getting that hippogriff killed had been his birthday present. “I won’t. Sir,” he added at Snape’s expectant eyebrow.

Snape’s lip curled but Draco couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a sneer. “Good.” He turned to leave.

“Who was she?” Draco blurted out. “The mudbl- muggle-born. The smart one.”

Slowly, Snape turned to him. “And _why_ is that so important?”

“I’m curious,” Draco shrugged, lifting his chin the way his father did when dealing with Ministry underlings. “As to why the Head of Slytherin is fraternising with a muggle-born.”

Snape appeared to falter at something in that statement, but by the time Draco had noticed it, it was gone. “Perhaps you should examine your own loyalties before questioning mine.”

Draco frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

“Precisely,” Snape arched his eyebrows, pursing his lips. “Will that be all, Mr Malfoy?”

“Well,” Draco blustered for a moment, thrown off. “Why is he going to your office? Favouritism is-”

“Mr Malfoy,” Snape interrupted, looking much older than he actually was. “I do not practise favouritism. I reward talent and hard work.” Potter and all of his docked house points flitted across Draco’s mind. He wasn’t exactly hard-working, but you couldn’t deny his talent. “I am meeting with him to improve his spellwork. Are you so lacking that you need to attend?”

Draco flushed a warm pink. “Well, what are you going to teach him? Sir.”

Snape sighed, a sharp exhale. “Your housemates share your pureblood inclinations, Mr Malfoy. I will be educating him on the warding charms your sorry excuse for a Defence against the Dark Arts has neglected to teach you. That will be all,” he commanded, leaving with a swish of his robes.

Draco stared after him for a few moments before a cluster of Ravenclaws bustled past, flashcards and textbooks in hand. 

“Do listen,” Snape intoned, voice cold. The older years hushed and the house stared up at him expectantly, gathered in the common room. “Professor Dumbledore has made an egregious mistake; after the hiring of Professor Remus Lupin-” Draco saw Davis smile into her hand. “-he neglected to inform the student body of Professor Lupin’s status as a werewolf.”

Gasps and whispers broke out though most sounded satisfied and Draco heard the clink of more than a few coins being exchanged.

“Merlin,” a seventh year sneered, looking disgusted. The rest of their year seemed to agree, muttering to each other. Draco caught the words ‘scandal’ and ‘Greyback’ returning.

“My mother will have a fit,” a first-year hissed eagerly. “Imagine, I could have died!”

“Quiet,” Snape ordered. “Do with that information as you will, though feel assured that Professor Lupin has resigned and shall no longer be classed as a teacher at Hogwarts come next morning.”

Greengrass’s face fell, and even Nott looked a little put out.

“Good evening,” Snape nodded and strode out of the dungeons, robes billowing out behind him.

“I liked Lupin,” Goyle admitted quietly. “Even if he was a dirty werewolf.”

Crabbe nodded in agreement. The two of them looked rather crestfallen.

“Oh well,” Zabini picked up his book again, something large and embossed in a language Draco couldn’t even begin to recognise. He hadn’t seemed ruffled by any of the events of the year now that Draco thought about it. Maybe he was a seer. “I’m sure his replacement will be… adequate.” His eyes rested on Draco for a moment before moving away.

Conversations returned to what they had been, a group of fifth years playing a six-way wizard chess game and some second years listening to a quidditch game over the radio in the corner of the room.

Meanwhile, their year was back in their two sofas and one chair, taking in the non-warmth of the fireplace.

“All things considered, this has been quite a relaxed year,” Nott remarked, absent-mindedly hexing Pansy’s nails to a putrid yellow colour. “I’m not complaining, but it feels like _something_ could have happened.”

“What could follow the Chamber opening?” Bulstrode pointed out. “I mean that was unbelievable!”

“A murderous family friend coming to skin me?” Nott grinned at her, and she laughed.

“Thank God we don’t have to deal with any of that!”

“Are we forgetting the murderous hippogriff?” Pansy squawked, subtly staining Nott’s Transfiguration homework with a detailed drawing of a phallus. “And thanks to Potter’s drama, we had to sleep in the Great Hall! And then the beast escapes,” she pouted, wrapping herself around Draco’s arm. “What if it comes back? It could break into the grounds! Creatures like that always remember slights.”

“It's a hippogriff, Pans,” Nott reminded her. “Not Sirius Black.”

“Who’s also escaped,” Pansy stressed. “What if they united?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nott sighed. “What could the odds of that possibly be?”

Zabini smiled.

“I still can’t believe Professor Lupin resigned,” Greengrass sighed, and Crabbe nodded.

“Same,” he murmured, unwrapping another box of chocolate frogs. “I got an A on that exam.”

Draco rolled his eyes. Merlin, their expectations were low.

They settled down into their discussions. Greengrass and Bulstrode were talking in the corner while Zabini simply sat near them and observed the other years; Crabbe and Goyle were muttering together on the floor and Nott and Pansy were now both frantically trying to spell each other before the other could stop them. 

Against his will, his gaze found Davis. She was sitting on the carpet, surrounded by woven gladioli flowers and pouring over their Arithmancy project. He winced, knowing it was due the next morning and Davis looked like she was still checking over the first sheet of the forty-two they’d produced. He glanced around them. Everyone else was busy.

“Don’t be an idiot, Davis,” Draco muttered, reaching down to cross out a symbol.

For a second, she just stared at him before nodding, correcting her equation. “Thanks.” 

He nodded, turning back to his own work. Before long, she handed him a completed sheet of questions and analysis and started on the next.

Draco glanced down at where her head was bowed, ponytail spilling over the table and nodding to herself. He checked over the work and returned it to the table, no other equations incorrect. 

He opened his mouth - he needed to ask about the project, he’d finished his part, but she hadn’t shown him any of hers, if she made him fail he would curse her into the - and closed it. She was _reasonably_ smart, he supposed. Smart enough to know not to talk to him after he’d called her... _that_.

A first-year with curled dark hair ran over to them, tugging on Greengrass’s sleeve excitedly. “Daph, is every year going to be like this?”

“I hope not,” Greengrass blanched. “I do want to pass my OWLs.”

“Welcome to being in the same school as Harry Potter,” Draco muttered, and Davis snickered, glancing up at him with a small grin. He smiled slightly back. 

“Just smile at the examiner, Daph,” Nott brushed off, and Greengrass frowned. “Who’s this?”

“Astoria Greengrass,” Draco answered on instinct, years of having the British pureblood families and their heirs drilled into his head finally coming to good use. “Third in line for the Greengrass succession.”

“Which one’s this?” Astoria whispered, not quite subtly enough. Nott laughed, and Greengrass went a practised shade of pink.

“ _Astoria_ ,” she chided, but the younger girl just frowned up at him before her eyes widened.

“Oh, the Malfoy!”

Nott laughed louder, reminding Draco exactly why he wasn’t going to invite him to the Manor over the summer to embarrass him in front of his parents.

“At least you’re _the_ Malfoy,” Crabbe offered, smiling encouragingly at the blonde. Draco glared at him.

“Astoria, this is Draco Malfoy,” Greengrass introduced them, looking pained. “First in line for his succession.”

Draco sniffed.

“It's nice to meet you Astoria,” Davis offered, shaking the first year’s hand.

“You should get some rest,” Greengrass told her sister, smoothing down her hair. “Are you packed for the train? Don’t forget anything; you can cast a quick finding spell if you’re unsure but be careful-”

“It's fine, Daph,” the first year pulled a face. “Night Draco!”

“Greengrass younger,” he nodded at her. She beamed, rushing off to her dorm, a few of her first-year friends giggling.

“I’m sorry,” Greengrass apologised, eyes closed. “I’ll make sure our mother spends more time on her etiquette over the summer; she’s always been spirited.”

Pansy shivered slightly, but only Draco and Zabini noticed. He knew exactly what her mother’s ‘etiquette’ lessons had been like. It was hard to imagine the cheerful first-year going through even a measure of that and still retaining that smile.

Slowly, the conversations picked up and before long, Crabbe was trying to set Bulstrode’s hair on fire.

“And congratulations to Mr Malfoy and Miss Davis for their Outstanding!” Professor Vector announced to a scatter of applause. Granger gaped at them from her desk across the room, stuck with her own E for the lack of cooperation between her and the Patil Gryffindor.

Davis beamed, holding up a hand. “High five, Draco!”

He blinked at her, and she waved her hand in front of his face. “You know you want to,” she teased.

He shook his head, and she huffed out a surprised laugh, grabbing his wrist and slapping their hands together.

“Not bad,” she grinned.

Slowly, he grinned back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References:  
> \- Slytherin values are listed as resourcefulness, cunning, ambition, determination, leadership, self-preservation, fraternity and lineage.  
> \- Interestingly: this presents a contrast in the house’s foundations - how can you practise self-preservation while also belonging to a group of people with mutual support and respect?  
> \- Monkshoods mean to be cautious as there may be danger nearby.  
> \- Malfoy is based of the French for bad faith which is ‘mal foi’ and the og Nicolas Flamel lived in Paris  
> \- Houdini is a Fowler’s toad which plays dead and secretes a toxin over it's back which can be fatal to small mammals. They’re native to North America but just picture Tracey with a New Yorker accent if that breaks the realism lol.  
> \- The kitchens can be found by tickling a painting of a pear  
> \- Slytherin muggleborns: I think it's reasonable for there to be barely any, after Voldemort’s first war the stigma must have been v strong and other wizard kids would probably discourage them when they meet on the train.  
> \- The Chamber of Secrets is apparently quite near the slytherin common room (which makes sense for Slytherin making sure his monster is close to hand) and I really like the idea of them in the dungeons just thinking the plumbing’s gone to shit when the basilisk is hissing  
> \- OFSTED is an office in England which inspects schools to make sure they’re up to par - both Millicent and Tracey are half-bloods so they'd probably know about it.  
> \- Harwell is named for Steve Harwell who’s the lead vocalist for the band Smash Mouth :)  
> \- Gladioli have quite a few meanings but the most common is usually honesty and faithfulness.
> 
> and now, an essay:
> 
> Ok, if you’re anything like me, you love numbers and you love highly specific numbers so I’ve done some quick thinking to work out class sizes. 
> 
> In Northern Ireland, the legal limit is 20 students in a ‘practical’ class (art, sciences) and in Scotland, it's 30. JK has said there were around 1000 students in Hogwarts (which checks out to me purely space-wise, my school (in England) has 1400 kids and we don’t learn in a castle - the only issue I could think of would be dorms but my suspension of disbelief extends to the founders being able to add in ‘unseen’ levels to the towers, eg an extension charm that allows for more space within house areas). 
> 
> However, in Harry Potter and Me, JK states that there are 40 people in Harry’s year (which would mean 280 in the whole school) and it's divided evenly between genders and house - and genders within houses themselves (honestly: bullshit, when the hat got to Zabini he would've had to be all ‘sorry mate you’re a Slytherin we need to make this aesthetically pleasing and easy for an author to keep track of’). 
> 
> So we have 10-30 people in a house in a year. With the 20 students in a class rule, let’s push it a little, say around 25 ppl per house per year (ie. 100 per year, 700 in school). These are much nicer numbers and let's say there are 21 people in Slytherin, 31 in Gryffindor, 26 in Raven and 22 in Huffle. 
> 
> Suck my dick JK Rowling. 
> 
> So that’s alright, right? WRONG. 
> 
> We know two houses share lessons so each house would have ~15 ppl in (for the 30 rule) and therefore 420 students. So let’s say there are more than 40 per year but how much more? Because we still have two-house lessons so are the houses split into halves? Half A charms with Raven B and Half B herbology with Gryffindor Half A? We know most families in Harry Potter send their children to Hogwarts and there are at least 28 'pure-blood' wizarding families (though it should be noted that the original Sacred 28 bloodlines have been diluted slightly - Millicent Bulstrode is said to be a half-blood). JK says half-bloods are about half the wizarding population so that could mean around 70 students in each year without even thinking about muggleborns. JK: 50% of the population half, 10% pure and 25% muggle-born. The final 5% is a mystery.
> 
> So, 13 kids in Harry's year are known pure-bloods, so that's 25% of a 52 strong year, with 29 half-bloods and around 9 muggle-borns. Woo. 52 also divides nicely into 4 with an average of 13 per house and class sizes of a reasonable 26.
> 
> But, as mentioned, JK says 40. Fuck her. In my opinion though, while there may be 40 people in their year, I believe there are only 9 Slytherins because I doubt many people would want to be sorted into that house (after all the stigma and Slytherin's bad reputation). I think Gryffindor has the most students (good press, respected), followed by Ravenclaw (they are at school to learn), then Hufflepuff, then Slytherin.
> 
> In conclusion, while JK may say 40 students, like absolute FUCK they divide neatly into gendered houses, in this essay I will


	2. Fourth Year: Millicent Bulstrode and Vincent Crabbe II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well this is hellishly long :)
> 
> lyrics from siames' [summer nights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM7Eh0gGNKA)
> 
> for heights in early years like 3rd to 5th, I picture it shortest to tallest: pansy, daphne, draco, crabbe, tracey, zabini, nott, millie, goyle.
> 
> and a quick summary:
> 
> The quidditch world cup, ireland wins and death eaters riot, attacking local muggles - someone casts the dark mark. Hogwarts - triwizard tournament announced, draco starts a fight with ron and harry and gets turned into a ferret by moody for trying to attack when their backs were turned. Lesson with moody on the unforgivable curses, beauxbatons and durmstrang arrive. Halloween - champions announced with harry as the 4th champion (general opinion NOT in his favour). Slytherins wearing potter stinks badges, first task at end of november fighting the dragons to get a golden egg. Yule ball, harry tries to ask cho but she already said yes to cedric. Harry finally gets to go with parvati. Christmas day w/the ball - hagrid telling maxime about him being a half-giant. 
> 
> Hagrid distraught (skeeter published article abt him), care of magical creatures with grubbly-plank on unicorns second task at end of february, third task at end of june. In the maze, he hears fleur scream, manages to find the cup w/cedric and gets transported to little hangleton. In graveyard, voldemort orders wormtail to kill cedric and is given a body, wormtail summons the death eaters. Voldemort criticises those who didn’t try to help him. Harry duels w/him, twin cores means curses don’t work and harry uses time to escape back to hogwarts w/cedric’s body. Reveal with crouch jr being moody, real moody found. People don’t believe harry about voldemort bc of skeeter. End of term feast, memorial for cedric, he toasts to cedric, everyone joins in. Dumbledore says that voldemort killed cedric, toasts to harry for courage and some slytherins don’t. He stresses unity and standing together. End of year! [draco's a twat in the train mocking (what he sees as) voldie's 'return' and gets knocked out]

_Winter's snows_

_Don't hide my woes_

_I can't lie to you_

_I tried to warn her that sometimes we fall in the dark_

_It's summertime_

“It's some old auror,” Nott waved a hand and Pansy nodded a firm agreement. “Not that it will matter past this year, of course.”

“I wonder why people keep taking the job,” Davis tapped her chin, slinging her suitcase off the train and jogging after them. 

“Desperation,” Nott told her, glancing at a group of Hufflepuffs and making them scatter. He swung up into the now-empty carriage and cocked an eyebrow at Draco, who folded himself neatly into a seat, pointedly avoiding looking at the empty space in front of the carriage. 

“Speaking of, anyone want to bet on the next minister?” Pansy declared. “Since Fudge screwed up the Quidditch World Cup, it seems to be a tie between Amelia Bones and Scrimgeour.”

“Scrimgeour’s an elitist twat,” Davis pulled a face. Naturally, there was mud smeared halfway up her ripped tights. “Spends all his time hunting nogtails in Norfolk and ignoring the actual danger Irish communities are in from caorthannach!”

“Bones also has more experience in management,” Draco acknowledged, ignoring the loping figures of Crabbe and Goyle trailing after him. “And she’s been on the Wizengamot for decades.”

“She’s been sleeping around for decades too,” Nott smirked and Crabbe snickered, jumping into the carriage and pulling out a box of fizzing whizbees more out of habit than anything else. 

“Sorry,” Bulstrode murmured as she joined them, huddling into the corner despite her size. Goyle hesitated but was quickly swept up by Greengrass to find a carriage with her. “Everywhere else was full.” 

No one looked at her as the carriage started to move.

“Bones is well within her rights to have partners,” Pansy sneered. “She’s an extremely accomplished witch first and foremost!”

“Even after her most recent boy toy was promoted to Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports?” Nott challenged. “Bagman’s a walking disaster and corruption isn’t that inspiring.”

Pansy gritted her teeth and dissolved into a rant about aesthetic appreciation and double standards.

Davis yawned, a wide grin splitting her face in half. She’d been smiling since she’d slipped into their compartment on the train but when he’d asked, all she’d said was that she was happy to be back. He supposed, on a surface level, he could understand what she was saying: Hogwarts _was_ a magical place, if one with more than a few issues, and the castle did feel like some semblance of a home. 

“The only worth of an object lies in its primary function,” Nott announced and Draco tuned back into the conversation. “The aesthetics will always be secondary.”

“How are you translating functions to witches?” Pansy drummed her manicured fingers against the carriage. “They have different abilities and strengths - is medical training superior to potion-making?”

“Stunning counterpoint!” Davis clapped. “Got to say, your money isn’t looking very good,” she whispered loudly to Crabbe, who pouted.

“I didn’t think I’d lose,” he whispered back, just as unsubtly.

“Obviously,” Pansy sighed. “Or you wouldn’t have made the bet. Morgana, you act like a muggle sometimes.”

Crabbe flushed, trying to duck his head but his height just meant that they could all see his crimson forehead. His trunk had a four-leaf clover from the Quidditch Cup in one corner and the plant was dancing back and forth like it was mocking him.

“And what bet?” Nott asked curiously.

“Who’d win your first argument of the term,” Davis popped one of Crabbe’s sweets into her mouth. 

“Well I won the debate in the train so _me_ ,” Pansy frowned and Nott scoffed.

“This term does not include the train ride,” Nott stated, leaning back. “And as I was saying, looks are inconsequential when you consider intelligence, empathy, magical aptitude and a host of other factors. Respond to that,” Nott jerked his chin at her and Pansy chewed on her response for a moment.

“If we were measuring the aesthetic body primarily, Millicent would have to go,” she remarked snidely and Crabbe laughed out loud, eager to encourage insults as long as they weren’t directed at him.

Draco rolled his eyes and he was talking before he could even really think about it. “If you gave her your nose, she’d be absolutely hideous.” 

Bulstrode’s mouth fell open.

Pansy pulled a face but quickly moved onto bad-mouthing one of the Weasley boy’s shoes.

Bulstrode blinked at Draco. He ignored her.

“Your healing had better improved,” he warned, hands on his shirt.

“It may have,” Davis tilted her head at him. “Are you still an asshole?”

“No,” Draco ground out.

She grinned. “Good. Did you get punched again?”

Draco let out a dry laugh and let the shirt drop.

There was a gasp behind him, followed by muffled cursing. 

“ _Fuck_ , Draco,” Davis whispered. He could see her raise a hand out of the corner of his eye before she hesitated. “Maybe we should just go to Snape-”

“ _No_ ,” he snarled. “I’m not asking you to remove them, just to stop them hurting so much.”

She bit her lip, glancing at the dorm door. After a moment, she slumped onto Nott’s four-poster and motioned for him to join her. He followed, staring at the dark stone walls inlaid with small serpentine twists and turns. The entire room was lit with a pale green light from the lake around them and if Draco squinted past the glass of the nearly floor-length arched windows he could see the shadow of a merperson reclining in the plant fronds. “For the record, I hold no blame if you start bleeding again.”

He reached blindly behind him to flick her.

She started to trail her wand over his skin, even as he could hear her swallowing.

He knew what she was thinking: he was _weak_ to let this happen, the proof of his own cowardice staining his back. There was purple wrapped over his chest to twist up his shoulders and arms from where he’d been clattered against the stones and an aching in his joints from where his bones had been forced to twist and meld into different shapes. The lingering feeling of _bad, bad, run, escape_ was still itching under his skin.

He also didn’t need a Healer to tell him that his left arm needed one of Pomfrey’s potions but, Merlin, he’d only been in school a week and he would _deal with it himself_. From Snape’s disappointed looks in his office (though they may have also been due to Moody’s pointed references to Snape’s past), Draco already knew that this year was only going to get harder. 

He clenched his fist, paper from his mother’s most recent letter crinkling inside his pocket, the pages on the manor, gossip and advice a welcome weight against his hip.

“There's a handprint,” Davis murmured, pink sparks from her wand jumping off to tingle against his skin like ash flakes from a pyre.

“Moody grabbed me,” Draco muttered back.

“He’s a cunt,” she declared. “Tell Pansy and she’ll rip out his other eye for you.”

Draco exhaled a pleased laugh and she snickered too.

For a few minutes, she worked in silence with nothing but the feeling of her wand across his skin telling him she was there. Obviously, that wouldn’t last.

“Did you know hippogriffs eat ferrets?”

Draco blanched. “Why would you say that?”

She winced. “It was kinda meant to make you feel better.”

“Well, it was an abhorrent job,” he shook his head and she smiled slightly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been called abhorrent before.”

The door banged open. “Oh.” 

Draco turned to see Crabbe standing in the doorway, shoulders slumped. “Oh?” he arched a pale eyebrow.

“Nothing!” Crabbe ducked his head down. His voice was just a whisper compared to his broad frame and the combination was admittedly rather off-putting, “Was…” he peeked upwards. “Was it Moody?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Draco rolled his eyes. Tension was knotting through his skin. Crabbe flushed harder. “It's a discolouring charm, we have an exam in Arithmancy.”

“Ok,” Crabbe immediately perked up. “Good luck, Davis!”

“Thanks, Vince!” she beamed at him and he smiled back.

“And, uh, Malfoy, Goyle’s gonna follow you to History if you wanna avoid him-”

“Leave,” Draco waved a hand and the other boy swallowed.

“Bye.” 

He picked up a box of chocolate frogs from his trunk, that childish four-leaf clover dancing against the dark leather, and let the door thud shut behind him. 

Davis hummed behind him. “He’s not the smartest, is he? Not in a bad way! He’s just,” she started to chew on her lower lip again. “Not what I was really expecting when we first met. Was kinda thinking of those big bodyguards from mob films.”

Draco didn’t reply, considering the words.

It was objectively true that Vincent Crabbe II was below average intelligence and tended to subvert people’s prior expectations. Honestly, he was one of the strangest wizards Draco had ever met and he would quite like to keep it that way.

He was one of the broadest in their year (second only to a Hufflepuff Beater named something like Macintosh) but he had a softer voice than Bulstrode. He followed Draco around like a dog but regularly made fun of Goyle for doing the same. His father was elegant and coy but he was blunter than a brick wall.

Then again, he considered the rest of them (Pansy’s hunter family and her fondness for creatures, Bulstrode’s father’s vanity and her penchant for covering her robes in cat hair, Goyle’s father’s shrewdness and his inability to perform basic charms) and supposed that they might all be distorted mirrors of their parents. He wondered what that said about him.

“Have you read Vector’s book on Nabta Playa?”

Davis frowned. “That was an extension,” she whined. “Why would I do more work than I had to?”

Draco just hummed. “You should. It's about astronomy in Egypt.”

The wand over his spine stilled. “Thanks,” she whispered. “That’s really cool.”

He wrinkled his nose. “It's just a book.”

“Maybe,” she grinned, reaching around to tap her wand against his nose and making sparks dance over his cheeks. “You’re-”

“Uh.”

They both turned to where Bulstrode was hovering by the entrance.

“Nott wanted his spare quills,” she threw out, hurrying over to his trunk and grabbing a few at random. Draco made a mental note to learn some locking charms. “What are you doing?” she asked before visibly regretting it.

“Ridding Draco of the blemishes hindering his snowy skin,” Davis smiled up at her. “Wanna watch?”

Bulstrode paled but Davis was already tugging her down beside them. She inhaled sharply.

“It's not that bad,” Draco sighed and Bulstrode let out a shocked laugh.

“You’re _purple_!”

“Obviously,” he drawled. “That’s what happens when blood vessels rise to the surface of the skin.” Merlin, some of the people in his year really were idiots. 

Davis knocked him, but carried on with her work, the dorm room quiet and smelling like long evening debates and early morning chess games with Zabini.

“Why did you try and curse him?” Bulstrode asked quietly. “There was a reason, right?”

Draco sniffed, tension lacing his shoulders. “He insulted my mother.”

“Insult’s a pretty broad term,” she sniffed back. “How _bad_ -”

“Bad enough,” he interrupted. Naturally, she was taller than Crabbe and as a result, he couldn't sufficiently look down his nose at her without looking ridiculous. He settled for simply glaring. “He doesn’t deserve to talk about her at all.”

Bulstrode didn’t respond to that, looking rather deep in thought.

“Done,” Davis patted his shoulder, carting him to Zabini’s floor-length mirror so he could observe his back. Bulstrode stayed on the bed, picking at the sheets and making a thread pucker. She dropped the silk like a rock, stumbling up and towards the door.

“Hm,” he shrugged his robes back on. “It's adequate.”

“It's perfect,” she waved him off. “Millie, you alright?”

Bulstrode froze, already halfway across the room. “I should go, Nott needs his-” she fumbled through her pockets, “quills!”

“We’ll join,” Davis snagged their bags and headed out. “Come on, Draco!”

He scoffed but followed them out of the dorm and into the cold but cosy common room. Nott glanced up from their spot by the fireplace and grinned, summoning the quills and immediately drawing a phallus over Pansy’s Transfiguration homework. Pansy, predictably, squawked and started to mutter about blinding jinxes while furiously rifling through her pockets. Goyle and Greengrass were both on the opposite sofa trying (and failing) to hide their concern while Zabini frowned into his book and Crabbe stared blankly down at his Charms homework. 

Davis bounded down the steps, dragging Bulstrode with her, to drop onto one of their sofas and lean against the taller girl after having somehow stolen Draco’s book on Nabta Playa.

Draco smiled.

“Mr Malfoy!” a voice called out behind them.

Bulstrode, who was walking with him more out of efficiency and the coincidence of Runes and Divination being in the same direction than anything else, turned and blinked, fingering the strap of her satchel nervously. “Professor.”

Professor McGonagall strode towards them, hair in a tight bun and wearing a dark green dress. “I was wondering if I may have a word?”

Draco swept his gaze over the empty corridor and smiled benevolently up at her. “Of course.” Mentally, he tried to work out which nights he could give up for detentions without missing the deadline for the Herbology essay due in two days that he hadn’t even started.

McGonagall looked pointedly at Bulstrode, who reddened and tripped her way over to the other side of the corridor like she hadn’t quite grown into her legs yet. The professor cast another look around them before leaning in.

“Are you alright?”

He blinked.

“Mr Malfoy, are you hurt?”

Draco flushed in offence. “I’m _fine_ , professor.” 

Bulstrode raised a disbelieving eyebrow behind the professor’s back and mouthed the word ‘purple’. He ignored her. 

“And I’m going to be late for my next lesson.”

McGonagall glanced at a sleek pocket watch. “Draco, the next period begins in thirty-five minutes.”

“What makes you think I’m not already late?”

McGonagall sighed before clicking her fingers. “Miss Bulstrode, are you late?”

Draco shot her a warning look but her eyes were fixed on the floor as she shook her head. “No, professor.”

Draco’s face darkened. He would get Goyle to hex her robes to the sofa later.

“Mr Malfoy,” McGonagall tried again and Draco turned back to her, patience wearing thin. “Human to animal transfiguration can be exceptionally painful, especially for those unaccustomed to it. And when it's… unplanned,” she told him, sharp eyes softening into something maternal.

He didn’t react.

“Poppy- Madam Pomfrey says that you haven’t visited her about any injuries but, Draco, if you need anything, please do ask. We’re here to help you but you need to let us. If necessary, I’m sure Madam Pomfrey could be persuaded into giving you a few doses of Dreamless Sleep.”

The final offer was a little more tempting but that was only because Nott was still having nightmares about his mother and Draco had the miserable task of sleeping in the bed next to him.

“It was an extremely powerful transfiguration.”

“Naturally,” Draco remarked. “I’d be more worried if a renowned auror wasn’t able to cast a spell satisfactorily.”

McGonagall continued like he hadn’t said anything. “And we really do want to help - you can trust us, the faculty here only has your best interests at heart.”

“Best interests like letting a werewolf roam free?” Draco scowled and McGonagall’s smile dropped.

“Professor Lupin was an esteemed member of this school who has been through a great deal-”

“I’m not disputing that, I’m saying it was irresponsible to allow him free reign of the school and its grounds-”

“This is not about Professor Lupin, this is about you.”

Draco exhaled sharply in annoyance but didn’t respond.

She looked him up and down once more but she didn’t look like she was going to try and press him further. “If you’re sure that you’re fine, you may leave. Do let me know if a similar incident occurs. That’s not a request.”

“Yes, Professor,” Draco agreed half-heartedly. “Thank you, Professor. Goodbye, Professor.”

He strode off before she could reply, blood boiling at the sheer contempt she’d shown him. He didn’t need anyone’s pity.

It was only when he had slumped into his seat in Runes on the same table as Davis and Greengrass that he realised Bulstrode had heard the whole thing and his anger burned even brighter.

Moody hobbled into the room with his clunking footsteps and Draco barely lifted his gaze from the desk. The nine of them were scattered throughout the large classroom, Zabini, Nott and Goyle all with tables to themselves, and Pansy was checking her reflection in her inkwell next to him. The animosity in the air was palpable.

Moody clunked over to the desk and sprawled himself into the old wooden chair, breathing harshly into the still air. “Vincent Crabbe,” he called out and Crabbe jumped in his seat next to Davis, murmuring a ‘yes’.

Moody’s magical eye flicked over each of them in turn as he finished up the register and dropped it onto the desk. 

He took a moment to just survey the small class, Nott and Pansy staring boldly at him and Bulstrode with her chin in her hand gazing out of the window. 

Draco watched Moody’s fist slam down into the desk. Classic intimidation tactic, his grandfather had practised it every time they’d met.

“There are two things I will cover in this lesson,” Moody finally announced, voice gruff and growling like an old lion. “One: Unforgivable Curses. Two: Cowardice.”

Draco saw Pansy’s knuckles whiten around her inkwell. Under the table, she knocked his foot with her own and Moody’s lips curled into a sneer.

“There’s no need for an introduction, I trust most of you are familiar with both concepts,” he reached under his desk to tug out a large glass jar of three identical spiders. Draco flicked his gaze up to settle on the one closest to him. “What’s the punishment for an unforgivable?” he crooked a thick finger at Nott who simply raised a bored eyebrow.

“Azkaban.”

Moody nodded deeply. “Aye. _Azkaban_. Greengrass, name one.”

“Imperius,” she answered. Out of the nine of them, she seemed to harbour the least ill will towards their new professor, though she might have just been the best at hiding it. 

“Describe it, Zabini.”

“Forces the victim to bend to your will, do whatever you want it to do.”

“Correct,” Moody murmured, reaching into the jar and lifting one of the spiders out. Draco heard Pansy’s inhale next to him as she realised what was about to happen. “Imperio.”

The spider twirled out a thin strand of silk, bouncing across the desk until it was able to glide up into the air and rafters, swinging across them and flying back to Moody’s hand. There, it sat perfectly still, nothing to do without commands.

“The Imperius curse is a tricky one to master because it can be resisted. You need to know who to target, who to avoid.” His eyes flicked from Draco to Zabini and Nott laughed quietly. Draco bit into his cheek, hard. “It's like the victim is in a lovely little dream, won’t even remember it if it's been performed properly. You could tell them to take a bite out of their own flesh and they wouldn't feel a thing.”

He motioned with his wand again and Draco watched the spider jump and dance, a delicate web weaving itself around the classroom. It looked so… peaceful. Happy. He shivered. Comforted. 

“Crabbe, next!”

The boy sputtered for a moment before the words registered. “Cruciatus!”

“Good,” Moody acknowledged. “Davis?”

Davis blinked. “I don’t know, sir.”

The class turned to her. Draco’s brows started to knit together.

“I know there’s a killing curse but,” she shrugged. “Don’t know this one.”

Moody barked out a rough laugh, retrieving another spider. The imperiused one was still swinging back and forth above their heads. “And people thought this house was great. You’re likely all spoiled brats.”

Davis looked unimpressed.

“The Cruciatus is a torturing curse,” Nott stated, methodically ripping out pieces of his textbook. Upon closer inspection, Draco realised that Nott had swapped his with Pansy’s and was in fact destroying hers. 

Moody grunted. “Crucio!” he flicked his wand at the spider and it threw itself into a huddle of limbs, twitching erratically back and forth. The room was still again, apart from the faint thuds of the spider hitting into the various items decorating Moody’s desk. Nott was barely breathing, eyes fixed on the creature.

“Malfoy, final curse,” Moody leered at him from the front.

Draco met his gaze, fists wrapped into vices. “Avada Kedavra.”

Moody didn’t break eye contact, jolting his wand out to the spider. “ _Avada Kedavra_.”

Green filled the room and the spider went still.

“Put some feeling into it boy,” Moody’s leer twisted into something dangerous. “You won’t kill anyone like that. Still,” he pushed himself up and swept the spider onto the floor. “I’m sure your father will be happy to give you some tips.”

“So then how do we defend ourselves?” Bulstrode asked and Moody frowned at her like he hadn’t been expecting anyone to speak. 

“Other classes were told about countercurses,” Greengrass joined in, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Would the defence for one of these be a spell?”

“For this?” Moody’s scarred face contorted in an expression that could have tried to indicate confusion, manoeuvring the final spider onto her desk and crucioing it. She swallowed. “There is no real defence.”

“Then why show it?” Pansy complained loudly. “We have OWLs! _Try_ and teach us something useful.”

Goyle covered up his laugh with a loud cough and Draco suppressed a smile of his own. He had to say, the sight of Pansy standing up to a man with fifty years and over a foot on her was an amusing one.

“Something you find funny?” Moody growled and Draco stilled.

Across the room, Davis had inched a little off her chair like she was going to launch herself at Moody if he tried anything. Stranger though, was the fact that Bulstrode had done the same.

“No.”

Moody’s scarred face morphed into something terrifying. “Say that to me again, _boy_.”

With any other teacher, Draco would have frowned and repeated the statement but this was Moody and he was holding his wand and staring him down with that creepily unseeing false eye and shudders were creeping up Draco’s spine.

“ _Cowardice_ is a disease and one that appears to be hereditary. Every little Slytherin here has cowards’ blood in them and to me, that’s worse than muggle blood is to your parents.”

“Our parents shouldn’t be brought into this!” Bulstrode snapped and Pansy started to grin. “This is supposed to be a lesson on curses.”

Moody’s magical eye flicked to the register as he walked down the columns of empty desks. “Bulstrode. Your uncle was a Death Eater. So was your grandmother. So was your cousin.”

Bulstrode had started to sink into her chair, pink staining her cheeks and creeping down to her neck. Draco hesitated, torn between his distaste for Bulstrode and his burning hatred of Moody. “That’s not _us_ though,” she whispered, mortified. “That’s-”

“Yes, your _father_ ,” he turned back to Draco. Nott opened his mouth before Moody whirled to him next. “And yours! And yours and yours!” he spat at Crabbe and Goyle in turn. 

Pansy held her breath as they all waited for the remark on her mother. None came. 

Moody looked them all over once more. 

The classroom was silent. 

He nodded with a sick satisfaction before hobbling back to his desk. “Take out your textbooks and make notes on chapter 5.”

“Crap,” Crabbe fumbled the blast-ended skrewt and it promptly blasted itself over a foot away from them, making an odd rattling noise. 

Pansy ran a hand down her face. “Greengrass owes me an apology for ever daring to suggest the halfbreed would make a decent teacher.”

On cue, her skrewt blasted off too and they had to jog after the two creatures before they lost them. Draco glanced down at the one he’d decided to observe, which was scuttling along the ground, occasionally letting a few small sparks loose. 

Half-heartedly, he followed the others to their new spot in the shade of Hagrid’s hut as the skrewts hissed at each other. Across the lawn, Goyle and Nott were discussing the upcoming tournament and the schools that would be arriving before the end of the week. _Their_ skrewts were sitting perfectly in place like well-trained owls. Nott had probably cursed them, Draco reasoned with himself. He _had_ been paying a strange amount of attention to Moody’s lesson.

“I’ve got to say,” Pansy mused, idly flicking at hers’ tail. “I’ve never heard of a creature like this.”

“Sting looks like a manticore,” Crabbe mumbled and she glanced at him. “Coulda been crossbred.”

She didn’t answer, which meant he was right. “Draco, have you done the Charms work?”

He frowned. “What Charm-”

“Great idea!” the booming voice of their teacher rang out across the lawn. “Why don’t the lotta yeh come down this evenin’ to observe ‘em a little more?”

Crabbe’s skrewt exploded, singing his robes. Draco blanched.

“I will not,” he said flatly. “I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks.”

Hagrid’s smile faded. 

“Yeh’ll do wha’ yer told,” he growled, “or I’ll be takin’ a leaf outta Professor Moody’s book… I hear yeh made a good ferret, Malfoy.”

The Gryffindors roared with laughter. Draco flushed with anger, but the memory of Moody’s punishment was still sufficiently painful to stop him retorting. He couldn’t stop himself from pointedly rolling up his sleeves though, and watching Hagrid’s face clench with guilt at the shimmering white scar carved down his left forearm was almost as satisfying as cursing him.

Pansy crossed her arms next to him, glaring at the other house. “Right, I’m getting him fired. He’s irresponsible, biased and an utter disgrace to Hogwarts reputation.”

“Patience,” Crabbe murmured, now absent-mindedly petting his skrewt. “That’s what Zabini says.”

“Of course Vincent,” Pansy flicked her hair back before a smirk spread over her face. “I can be patient.”

“Give me that,” Draco clicked his fingers, and Crabbe handed him the newly softened iron clip. 

Greengrass was curled into the other end of Draco’s sofa slowly stroking a custard-yellow Puffskein as it rumbled its approval.

Pansy took one long look at the badges spread in front of them and burst into laughter. “ _Draco_ ,” she stressed as she wheezed for breath. “Darling, sweetheart, this is why you failed Astronomy last year!” Across the room, he saw Davis lift her head and he shoved Pansy away, feeling his cheeks grow red. “Make Diggory’s side red as an extra insult to Gryffindor.”

Draco rolled his eyes but recoloured the large block letters spelling out ‘Support CEDRIC DIGGORY - the REAL Hogwarts Champion!’ to a vivid red.

“Malfoy?” Crabbe murmured and the blond looked up from the pots of metals and cloth around him. “My father wants to know how you are.”

Draco leant over the table to snatch the thin letter from the other boy, his abnormally high body heat nearly scalding him.

_‘Vincent,_

_Keep up the quidditch._

_Tell Draco that his father and I are rather pleased with his progress; I also wish to inform him of an internship opportunity at my wife’s potions laboratory in the south of England by the Hampshire coast. I hope he is well?_

_\- Vincent Crabbe’_

The letter was signed with a slightly smudged black seal and Draco’s gaze darted to where melted wax was smeared over Crabbe’s thumb. His own letter from his parents was bundled up in his bag, pages upon pages secured with ribbons and magic to make sure they didn’t get out of order, signed with an intricate drawing of a dragon around a narcissus with two stars shining above it.

“Your mother invested in a potions lab?” Draco arched an eyebrow and Crabbe flushed, sinking into the velvet cushions.

“S’my other mother. The new one.”

“Elizabeth Crabbe,” Draco muttered under his breath. She was a half-blood from America who had married up after seducing Crabbe Sr with her beauty and wit. Mainly her beauty. No one quite seemed to know what had happened to Crabbe’s first mother though if rumours were to be believed, she was more than happy to be done with Crabbe Sr and had decided to live out the rest of her life in Sicily at the suggestion of… Draco glanced around them. _Another_ witch.

On the other sofa, Crabbe’s mood seemed to have noticeably dampened and Greengrass had looked up from her Runes textbook to frown worriedly at him. Out of the corner of his eye, Draco saw her knock over an inkwell and curse, somehow avoiding getting any of the liquid on her skin. “Are you gonna do it?” he muttered. “The potions thing.”

Draco shrugged, folding the letter into crisp lines and handing it back over. “It depends.”

They fell silent. Zabini was in his usual chair (reading a book Draco wouldn’t be surprised to see Granger absorbing), Pansy was lounged next to him on the sofa with Greengrass and Davis on her other side and Crabbe was across from them, back to squinting down at the letter. The room was quiet except for the crackling of the fireplace and he was surrounded by the ambient magic needed to make the badges but he wouldn’t quite call it peaceful. 

“It's dragons!” Bulstrode burst into the common room, making a beeline for them and knocking into more than a few first years.

Zabini blinked at her, before turning back to his book.

Goyle and Nott scrambled into the room behind her; Nott jumped onto the opposite sofa with a satisfied sigh and Goyle (who had clearly been prepared to do the same before noticing Greengrass) delicately lowered himself into the leather.

“For the first task!” Bulstrode stressed, cheeks flushed from exertion. “They’re in these big cages in the forbidden forest and they were feeding them with goats and sheep and-”

“We know,” Pansy drawled, Witch Weekly draped over her lap as she scanned through the gossip columns. “Macnair told my family months ago.”

Bulstrode’s face fell but the rest of them had already gone back to what they were doing. Goyle seemed to mirror her disappointment but he quickly managed to hide it in favour of staring at the older years mingling around them.

Bulstrode nudged Crabbe’s shoulder with her own as she pulled out a Divination textbook titled ‘Unfogging the Future’. Like they’d planned this, Crabbe pulled out two teacups and a kettle. He cast a quick ‘incendio’ and a steady flame lit up the end of his wand. For Crabbe’s usual record with magic, it was an exceptional success. Before long, the tea was ready and they chugged them, leaving only the dregs.

“S’a circle,” Crabbe aptly observed. 

“Like the sun?” Bulstrode asked. “That means great happiness.” She leant over him to peer into the small cup. “It might also be a skull.”

Crabbe looked at her blankly.

“That one means danger.”

He swallowed. “Am I gonna die?” he whispered and Bulstrode shrugged, looking like she wouldn’t care either way.

Zabini looked up, laughed, and promptly went back to his book. 

“If you find it so funny, why don't you help?” Bulstrode glared at him. Zabini laughed louder, flicking his wand lazily. 

The textbook clapped closed and floated over to the fireplace, exploding into green sparks. One of them hit Draco’s cheek. Crabbe was silent and the blond glanced at Zabini.

“Right!” Bulstrode shoved herself up. “What the fuck is your problem?”

The common room went quiet and she froze.

Some of the lower years started to laugh, giddy with their new school and connections. There were cruel smiles present in the older years too (particularly in the sixth years, what _was_ it about sixth years?).

“Mil-” Greengrass whispered but Bulstrode wasn’t listening.

She stormed up to the dorms to a chorus of laughter from nearly everyone present. Draco snickered.

The laughter died down and the room went back to the quiet murmuring of before. Draco looked up and Zabini was staring at him, a bored look gracing his features. “And you don’t think it's strange you’re going to this much effort.”

Draco scoffed, following his gaze to the badges. “It's not an effort. And making fun of Potter is always worth it.”

Zabini hummed. He looked like he was trying not to laugh. Draco kicked him.

Suddenly, Greengrass sat up, patting over her skirt. “Where’s Callis?”

Crabbe flushed and they all fell silent to hear a faint purring coming from his pocket. The puffskein poked its head out of the space before ducking back down.

“I think she likes the warmth,” he whispered and Greengrass coed, peering into his robe. Goyle slumped into the sofa, looking like he would rather like Greengrass to peer into _his_ robes.

_Draco’s bones were compressing into splinters, carving through his skin and dragging through his blood - red was dripping over his skin uncontrollably, left arm twisting and twirling into knots, shimmering a violent silver as the very skin moved and contorted and-_

He opened his eyes. The dorm was quiet.

“ _Temps_ ,” he muttered, running a hand down his face and his wand lit up with the digits 04:06. He wrinkled his nose and swept open his curtains, knowing he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep without drugging himself. He turned and stilled.

Across the room, with every other bed closed and quiet, Crabbe was huddled on his trunk, wrapped in his blanket and shaking ever so slightly. His eyes were fixed on Draco.

The blond nodded at him, straightening his cuffs. Suddenly, he felt ridiculous in his pyjamas even though Crabbe was wearing the same thing he was. It was too… vulnerable, he decided. 

Crabbe hadn’t moved.

Draco glanced at the time again and sighed. “Come on, we’ll go to the kitchens.”

Crabbe frowned. “The _kitchens_? But it's-”

Draco had swept out of the dorms before he could hear the end of the sentence. Predictably, Crabbe’s heavy footsteps sounded out behind him as he left the common room and ducked into the main school. 

It was only a few minutes until they were by the kitchens but with the threat of Filch and his stupid cat hanging over their heads, it felt like days. Not that it unsettled Draco.

Still, slipping into the warm room full of tasteful shades of bronze and the comforting scent of pastries made his muscles loosen.

“Good night, sirs!” a chirpy house elf greeted them, hands clasped behind their back. Behind them, tens of elves worked at their station busily preparing food and cutting ingredients into separate pots and bowls. “What can we do for yous today?”

Crabbe’s mouth fell open. Slowly, he turned to look at Draco like he was a veela. “Can-could we have some custard doughnuts?” he asked, mouth still hanging open like he was expecting the elves to simply place the food in there for him.

The elf beamed and vanished with a crack to where a fireplace was laden into stonework and quickly began to mix what seemed to be prepared dough with sugar, dividing it into neat circles and whisking the full tray into the oven. As they did this, they hummed a quiet tune, like it would distract them from what seemed to be a disturbance in the corner of the kitchens. There was a yelp.

“What was that?” Draco cocked an eyebrow.

“Dobby’s not wanting to see you, sir!” the elf dusted their hands off on a tea towel. “Because yous is a Malfoy, sir.”

Draco hummed, unwilling to admit that he had no idea what a Dobby even _was_ , let alone this one’s particular function.

Without fanfare, the elf swept custard into their doughnuts, the tray now laden with oozing treats and handed it to them with a pleased smile. “If yous please, yous can sit here!” they beamed, sweeping their hands and summoning a small checkered tablecloth, complete with plates and a small vase of a single yellow flower.

They both sat. They didn’t talk, just stayed there until the castle began to stir and the elves’ pace frantically increased to the point where Draco felt a little bad for taking up space in their workroom despite their frenzied protests.

As they left, Crabbe glanced at him and mumbled a quick ‘thanks’. For a strange, unexplainable moment (though if he was honest, a Gryffindor probably hexed him), Draco smiled.

Four days and someone with higher powers who seemed determined to make him a better person later, Draco found himself staring blankly down at the ball of yellow fluff vibrating under Crabbe’s elbow like it could help him with his Potions homework. (Really though, Draco reasoned with himself. Who on earth would know what a bezoar was?)

Across the common room, Davis shook her head and gestured pointedly with her right middle finger. Crabbe nodded studiously and copied the movement. They giggled. Zabini was watching Crabbe over the top of his book, eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

Draco lifted a hand to massage his temples, a headache already forming (30% from dealing with the stupid skrewts, 20% from his housemates, 40% from his Potions essay and about 130% from the fact that _Potter was a Hogwarts champion because the staff had decided that him exploding into a million little pieces wasn’t a suitable punishment for breaking the clearly set out rules even though Draco would be more than happy to cast the spell himself and save the goblet the trouble; not to mention that he had WON the first bloody task - really was any sacred tradition free from his disrespect?_ ). 

“Draco,” Pansy nudged his foot, yawning into her hands. A ‘Support Cedric Diggory’ badge was twinkling on her jumper and the Hufflepuff’s shining face was reflected all over the common room. “Go and get my book.”

He pulled a face but seized the chance to take himself somewhere slightly warmer. 

Pushing open the door to the girls’ dorm, he froze.

“Bulstrode?” he murmured. His voice couldn’t seem to come out any stronger. Her kneazle hissed at him from under a bed, black tail swishing steadily back and forth.

The girl in question whirled around, red already exploding over her face as she shoved the dress behind her, oblivious to the fact that it was clearly visible in the mirror she’d been facing. Objectively, the dress was decent, he supposed. A clean blue with a low neckline and rounded shoulders. 

“Is that yours?”

She scoffed like he was joking. “It's Daphne’s. God, please don’t tell her, Malfoy, I’ll do your Potions for the rest of the year, I swear, just please don’t-”

Draco clicked his fingers. “First of all: I don’t need you dragging my grades down-”

Bulstrode frowned. “I got all Os last year.”

Draco ploughed on, barely acknowledging the words. “And second, if you want to wear a dress so badly, just buy one - I know your family has the money.”

Bulstrode looked away, fingers digging into the blue and crumbling the fabric. She was crying, he realised. “My mum thinks I should focus more on sport.”

Draco hummed, Bulstrode _would_ be a force to be reckoned with on the quidditch field as a beater. “I wasn’t aware that ‘sport’ was a lifelong obligation.”

“With my family?” Bulstrode laughed, squeezing her arms. “My grades don’t even matter. I mean-” she looked up with wide eyes like she'd only just realised who she was talking to. “It's not like that, they _do_ , obviously, but-”

“Bulstrode,” Draco interrupted, already getting tired. “Just buy a dress.” He looked from the one she was holding to her frame. “One that would actually fit you.”

She stuck her tongue in her cheek, clearly annoyed.

“Morgana, Draco, what’s taking-” Pansy drew to a stop, plucked eyebrow raised. In an instant, her eyes had gone over the dress, the mirror, the tears and Draco standing awkwardly by the wall. “Got an excuse for wasting my time, Bulstrode?”

Bulstrode flushed an ugly purple and tugged her collar up to hide her mouth, shaking her head quickly. Her cheeks were starting to glisten in the green light from her silent weeping.

“Pansy-”

“Don’t,” she held up a hand. “Why on earth are you crying?”

Bulstrode stilled but she was still hiccuping occasionally. “What?”

Pansy didn’t repeat herself. 

“I-” she sneezed and a new wave of tears barrelled down her face. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave, I-”

Pansy pointedly moved to block the exit. “I asked you a question.”

Bulstrode’s eyes flickered from the mirror back to Pansy and the shorter girl sighed loudly, striding in and shoving Bulstrode onto her bed. 

“Don’t give up yet, Bulstrode. I can fix this.”

“No, you don’t need to, you’re-”

“Shut up,” Pansy sneered down at her, tugging out an overflowing makeup bag from her trunk. Her eyes flickered to the dress. “And never try to wear blue again, it makes you look like a nurikabe.”

“Why?” 

Pansy’s brows drew down. “Excuse me?”

“You _hate_ me,” Bulstrode whispered. “You both,” her eyes flicked to Draco, who just watched her. “Hate me. Like, I get I’m not a pureblood but-”

“She said shut up,” Draco stated. He’d had enough lectures about blood purity from the girls in his house to last him a lifetime.

Pansy lifted Bulstrode’s chin and tipped it this way and that. 

“Your complexion suits lighter tones, you’d look nice in a cool orange but white’d also make your eyes” - she pulled back to flick her wand, muttering a quick darkening charm for her lashes - “pop.” 

Draco, who had been naturally blessed with good looks, started to flip through the Witch Weekly magazine on the table.

 _‘“I just want everyone to know how beautiful they are,” winked Harry Potter, our very own action hero, when asked about his love life. He continues to woo his fans (just last week he went out of his way to help an older girl with her Defence homework, though it should be noted that the next day he was seen at Hogsmeade with her best friend - what a little heartbreaker he is!) with the tips he must have learnt from the heartthrob Gilderoy Lockhart. I’m sure we’re_ all _curious to see who he’ll take with him to the Yule Ball!’_

He snapped it shut and turned back to the girls with him.

Bulstrode’s face was defined with the powders Pansy swore by and her lips were shimmering slightly. Honestly, she looked almost exactly the same. Pansy hummed. “And your hair?”

Bulstrode pouted. “I like my hair,” she wove a lock around her finger. Draco could see the appeal, it was thick and a dark chestnut brown with just enough of a wave to make it seem like she’d put effort into it.

“I like your hair too,” Pansy decided, summoning a brush and twisting the brown over one shoulder. Bulstrode peeked up at her through her thick fringe, pink staining her cheeks again. “Now, I’m going to lend you my shampoo until you can get your own, don’t overuse it, don’t underuse it, don’t waste it, don’t massage it in for too long, don’t…” 

Pansy continued to rattle on as Draco traipsed through the girls’ dorms, casually curious about the tidiness (bar Davis’s bed, naturally) compared to the general mess of the boys’ dorm. Greengrass’s textbooks were _alphabetized_ for Merlin’s sake. Draco didn’t think he even _had_ a Runes textbook anymore.

The next day saw him up bright and early to support Pansy’s new endeavour to make Bulstrode bearable to the naked eye, which meant he had to walk her into breakfast so the other Slytherins could take note of her supposed 'transformation'.

“You look happy,” he murmured as, as promised, a seventh year girl gaped at them. 

Bulstrode smiled, close to ducking her head, but practise made her remain tall. “I am happy. You know,” she nudged him. “If people saw you like this, they’d like you more.”

“If they can’t be bothered to deserve this then they aren’t worth it,” he dismissed. Besides, Pansy did all of the work. He was just the one who walked her into the hall. 

An older Ravenclaw jogged past and slammed his shoulder into Goyle, making the boy trip and fumble as his bag tumbled down the steps. Three books slipped over the moving bannisters and Draco heard a few furious shouts from the ground floor.

Goyle’s eyes were wide and he was growing pale as ink started to bleed through his parchment and work.

Draco couldn’t stop the snort at Goyle’s expression and Pansy snickered too. She swept them away, arms linked with him and Bulstrode. The taller girl looked behind to help but they’d already been ushered onto another staircase, rotating quickly away from the other Slytherin.

Soon, they were all gathered in History, only Bulstrode, Pansy and himself sitting at the same desk. Across the room, Greengrass sat with her arms crossed and chin lifted pointedly away from them. Even Davis looked uncomfortable at the shift in dynamics.

“Could someone please take Astoria?” Greengrass asked. “It would just make her year and we never got to do anything like that in second year-”

“No, we were too busy dealing with petrifications and basilisks,” Bulstrode muttered spitefully. It didn’t seem like she was even aware she’d spoken, brows knotted and quill scrawling circles in the corner of her textbook.

“And it would mean the world to her, I know it will.”

Because Zabini was the worst person Draco had ever met, he looked up and smirked. “Goyle, why don’t you? They look similar enough, or is she too young?”

The taller boy gaped at him, looking faintly green. “What are you on about?”

“Blaise,” Greengrass whispered, mirroring Goyle’s expression. “Why would you-”

“I’ll do it,” Nott raised his hand, nodding at Greengrass. “Beats having to actually ask someone.”

“Who are you taking?” Davis asked Draco, lifting his book to grin at him. “I know a Ravenclaw girl who’d love it-”

“He’s with me,” Pansy interrupted. “Though I was _expecting_ something elaborate,” she sneered at him. Draco glared back, temper already fraying.

“Then you should have decided to go with someone else.”

“Maybe if you weren’t so busy with all this Potter nonsense-” she cut herself off with a sharp sigh. “Morgana, Draco, you can be pathetic sometimes.”

He slammed his fist into the table. Feral magic was crackling around them and their whole group was shifting uncomfortably. “Careful, Parkinson.”

She gritted her teeth but didn’t say anything else.

The group was silent.

“So,” Greengrass finally swallowed. “What did you guys think about Krum and that dragon?”

“For Merlin’s sake, no one cares about that bloody dragon!” Pansy snapped. “Do you have anything actually useful to say-”

“Oh shut _up_ ,” Greengrass pushed herself up. “You lot are exhausting. Come on, Millie.”

Bulstrode froze in her place next to Pansy. The shorter girl smirked, patting Bulstrode’s shoulder. 

“Are you going to go like a dog then?”

Bulstrode’s jaw tightened. “No.” 

“Daphne!” Goyle declared suddenly, face burning. “Do, do you have a date?”

She blinked at him before nodding, disappointment obvious. “Marcus Turner in Ravenclaw asked me.”

“Cool,” Goyle’s voice cracked and his face started to crumple. “That’s uh-”

“Greg-”

He pushed himself up and quickly left the common room. Draco watched him bring a hand up to his face and _scrub_.

Greengrass looked crestfallen.

“Let’s go,” Davis rose, linking arms with Greengrass and leading her up to their dorms. (Davis glanced at Draco before disappearing but his eyes were trained on the table in front of him, arms crossed.)

Nott whistled under his breath, smiling slightly. “What did they _do_ , Pans?”

She didn’t answer. 

Nott started to whisper with Crabbe, the latter quietly miming quidditch movements and swings. Draco’s gaze flicked to them, biting down the insult to their technique - it wouldn’t be worth the conversation that would ensue.

Pansy snapped her magazine shut, glowering at anyone who dared to look in her direction. Draco already knew that neither of them would apologise, they’d just continue as normal the next day. Sourly, he realised that these arguments _were_ their normal.

Bulstrode was chewing on her lip and Draco caught her eyes darting around their group: from Draco to Pansy, Nott to a cluster of second years, Goyle’s empty space to where Greengrass had disappeared to. His lip quirked upwards before he forced himself back into passive annoyance. 

The two weeks leading up to Yule seemed to be marked by every female in the school placing themselves in increasingly compromising positions in front of Zabini like the flash of a breast would be enough to entice him to spend an evening with them. As it was, Zabini seemed more interested in Bulstrode’s cat. 

A smile curled up his cheeks as an idea began to form.

On cue, Zabini swept into the dorm, running a hand through his shorn hair and shelving his textbooks for the day next to his bed. 

“Good afternoon,” Draco greeted blandly, reviewing the cufflinks his father had sent him against the dim candlelight. The letter that had accompanied them (one that had told him to shut his mouth about what had occurred with Moody due to the power he held in the auror department and the position their family occupied) was already in ashes. Zabini didn’t acknowledge him. “Heard a seventh year asked you to the ball.”

“Jealous?” Zabini drawled, hand hovering over his books before he finally turned to examine the blond. “I wouldn’t have taken Hufflepuffs as your type but you are already such a disappointment.”

“At least I have a father to disappoint,” Draco forced a laugh and Zabini conceded the point with a wry smile. 

“What else do you have that I don’t then?” 

“A partner.”

“Ah,” Zabini leant back, smiling like a grandparent indulging a child. “And here I thought you were about to ask _me_. Really Draco, I’m flattered but I don’t think I could pull off glasses-”

“Shut up,” Draco interrupted, resisting the urge to stamp his foot. “I don’t know or care what you’re on about.” 

Zabini sighed. “I suppose you have a suggestion then?”

“More of a stipulation, really.”

Zabini raised an eyebrow and while he was still smiling, it had taken on a spiteful air.

“You already know what I want so I won’t waste my breath. Do it or I’ll tell Crabbe about the role your mother played in his parents’ divorce.”

Zabini stilled for a split second before recovering.

“I’m not afraid of you, Malfoy,” he murmured, examining his eyebrows in the mirror. 

Slowly, a smirk crept up the blond’s face as he twirled his wand idly over his knuckles. The Malfoy cufflinks were gleaming at the ends of his sleeves. As he reached the exit, he glanced back over his shoulder. 

“Maybe you should be.”

Zabini’s smile vanished and the door shut with a mere whisper of air.

It was six days before the ball when, during breakfast, Zabini stood up and what felt like the school’s entire female population straightened.

His shoes clacked down the hall as he made his way down to their cluster at the end of the table, past Crabbe sitting alone, Nott and Pansy muttering about Hagrid, and Davis entertaining some fifth years with her astronomy knowledge. 

Their group was undeniably scattered with nothing to complain or argue about. It wasn't like they talked about _good_ things.

Still, Zabini continued on until even Goyle and Greengrass, who were only a few spaces away from them, looked up too.

He flicked his wand and summoned a green rose, presenting it to Bulstrode with a flourish,

Draco watched him casually, chin in hand as he carried on eating his apple. Zabini didn’t even offer him a glare.

“Millicent,” he said, voice carrying through the hall. Some Gryffindors were craning their necks from the other side of the hall to see what was going on. 

Bulstrode was still staring at him, a half-eaten piece of toast dangling from her hand. Draco couldn’t help but sigh at her bitten down nails and the crumbs sticking to her mouth.

“What?”

“Would you do me the honour of accompanying me to the Yule Ball?”

Across the hall, girls were gasping and pouting and even Greengrass’s eyes were wide.

Bulstrode glanced down the table at Pansy, who held her hands up (she was clearly annoyed that she hadn’t been involved, but Draco supposed she deserved some kind of revenge for sparking the argument that had led to this situation).

“Are you serious?” she frowned and Zabini’s cool smile froze. “Why the _fuck_ would I want to go with you? You're an asshole on your best days.”

His smile slipped entirely, straightening. “ _Excuse me_?”

“You heard me,” she rolled her eyes. “You can leave now.”

Zabini’s face darkened and Draco heard a group of Huffpleuffs whispering about how rude Bulstrode was, how ungrateful. Draco was too in shock to agree with them.

The two stared at each other until Bulstrode shook her head, pushing herself up and leaving the Hall without further fanfare.

Without thinking, Draco followed her, hurrying down the corridors. 

“Wait-” he rounded a corner and she turned to him, defeated and tired.

“ _What_?”

“Why did you say no?”

She scoffed in disbelief, striding out to the castle grounds. Draco only hesitated for a moment before following. “Were you not there when he bullied me for years? When he burnt my Divination textbook? When he was _awful_?”

Draco blinked down at his feet. He’d been so sure this would work. The Malfoy cufflinks felt like they were dragging his body down. “But we all do that.”

Bulstrode shrugged and they finally drew to a stop by a rocky corner of the lake, the beach crunching under their feet. They were hidden by a strategically placed olive grove and Bulstrode’s shoulders slumped in relief at the privacy.

“That doesn't make it normal,” she scoffed. “If we all killed someone, does that make it ok? If we were all Death-” she cut herself off, clicking her tongue. “This isn’t normal, Malfoy.”

He watched her pick up a rock and throw it over the water, the stone bouncing five times before settling to the lake floor. Ripples stretched out over the lake towards them. 

“Don’t tell them I come here,” she asked, running a hand down her face. “Just- please.” 

He nodded, despite himself. “Alright.”

She glanced at him but he didn’t say anything else, staring out at the grey waters. The ripples were disappearing slowly but surely.

“Mobiliarbus,” he muttered, levitating a rock and skipping it across the lake surface the same way Bulstrode had. Seven bounces. She glanced at him.

“Do it without magic.”

He pulled a face but obeyed, grabbing a new rock. The wind was cold and it bit down through his robes. Tugging up his scarf, he tried to flick the stone the way she had only for it to drop into the lake with a humiliating ‘plop’. Bulstrode smiled.

“The wind was blowing against it,” Draco muttered and her smile widened.

“Sorry for ruining your big plan,” she threw out and his lips twitched.

“Watching you embarrass Zabini was better.”

“They won’t see it like that.”

“But Zabini did,” Draco snickered. “Did you _see_ the look on his face?”

“The way his nose got all pinched? Looked like he swallowed a shitty Bott’s bean,” Bulstrode huffed and Draco let out a genuine laugh, loud and swallowed by the wind.

From Bulstrode’s grin though, he knew she’d heard it.

“We’re going to be late to-” he faltered and remembered that it was the holidays. “Wanna go to Hogsmeade? I need more envelopes.” ~~His parents hadn’t been replying to his owls but if he sent them just _one_ more, he was sure that they would soon.~~

She breathed out, closing her eyes. “For the record, Malfoy, forced asks to the ball are _much_ worse than joke ones. But…” she pulled a face, eyes crinkled like she was holding back laughter. “That was quite funny. And I guess it's the thought that counts,” she knocked their shoulders, turning on her heel to crunch her way back up to the castle, hands in her pockets and scarf floating in the wind.

Draco watched her go before the lake’s freezing waves lapped at his feet and made him jolt back, swearing under his breath.

The ceilings were vaulted with ice, and snow was drifting down around them, dusting Draco’s dark robes with silver flecks reminiscent of stars. There were freezing charms woven into the walls so that the snow wouldn’t melt, yet the temperature was mild and Pansy, in her low cut pink dress, didn’t seem to feel the cold at all.

There were elaborate ice sculptures of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang and the hall was bathed in a cool blue light that bounced off of Pansy’s curled dark hair and made her look positively ethereal. Mighty fir trees lined the walls, dusted with snow and making the room look like it had been lifted straight from a forest in the middle of Europe. It was _stunning_.

“Come on, I see our table,” Pansy steered him, pink silk fluttering against her arm like spiderwebs. She was significantly less impressed by the hall but only because she had interrogated the house elves three weeks prior to make sure that her dress would match the ceiling.

“Finally,” Nott smiled, taking a seat next to him and dutifully pulling Astoria’s chair out for her. The younger girl giggled, looking rather taken with the scenery. He wondered if she was considered too young for her parents’ parties but that seemed absurd to him - he’d been taken along since he was seven. Her and Nott were in neatly matching robes, with Nott flaunting light purple accents in his and Astoria covering her own lilac dress with a floaty black cloak.

Nott and Pansy nodded at each other and Draco relaxed. An unspoken truce for the evening it was.

Crabbe and Goyle joined them too, both in dark green robes, and Pansy snickered. “You too look like trolls.” 

Crabbe flipped her off and Davis laughed, sliding into her own seat next to Astoria. Her hair was flowing down her back and she was clad in a light green dress that looped over her shoulders. It felt decidedly strange to see her without her hair tied up, like he was looking at someone he’d never _really_ known. 

Suddenly, on a table filled with his housemates and his oldest friend, he felt indescribably alone.

Zabini strode in, with a seventh year Hufflepuff on his arm, murmuring something to her that made her laugh. She was average, he supposed. Pretty to the extent that some boys were sighing after her while Zabini… looked like Zabini which was seemingly enough to make the girls around the hall grow flustered and reach for water.

Soon after though, his attention was caught by something _much_ more important.

Bulstrode walked in with a handsome Beauxbatons boy, the two of them clearly still strangers.

Her thick dark hair was twisted into a bun decorated with small crystallised arrows and her eyes were lined in black. Her dress was midnight blue and cut asymmetrically so that one shoulder was exposed to the night air. Next to him, Pansy leant back, looking unreasonably satisfied with herself. Bulstrode was beaming, walking straight and confident.

“You look gorgeous!” Astoria exclaimed when they reached their table and Bulstrode grinned at her, cheeks flushed.

“She knows,” the boy murmured, throwing her a wink and looking a little surprised when she just knocked his shoulder, laughing.

“Where’s Daph?”

“With Marcus Turner,” Goyle muttered, jamming his fork into his empty plate and half-heartedly motioning to where one of their missing housemates was sitting with a group of sixth year Ravenclaws. “He’s a _chaser_.”

Bulstrode patted his shoulder.

“Who’s this?” Pansy smiled up at the new boy and he flushed, eyes clearly caught on her. 

“I’m Xavier Bousquet,” he purred, lifting her hand to press a kiss to the knuckles. Bulstrode pulled out her own chair and smiled awkwardly at Davis who tried to smile back. “You must be Miss Parkinson.”

“Talk about me often do you, Millicent?” Pansy asked and the taller girl went pink under the makeup, a flush visible by her ears where it wasn’t so thick. 

“Enough,” she answered, quickly taking a sip of some water. “Saves you the trouble of repeating your name all the time doesn't it?”

Pansy’s smirk widened and before long, the meals were served, eaten (with commentary from Mr Xavier Bousquet on Zabini’s interest in cougars that was far funnier than it had any right to be) and Dumbledore was standing at the head table.

“Please rise!”

The room obeyed and Draco watched him wandlessly summon a stage at the end of the hall and push their tables and chairs back with a woosh of air. Really though, Draco thought to himself. It wasn’t _that_ impressive. As Dumbledore cleared the floor, the ceiling morphed into another scene - snow lighter and stars twinkling even brighter than before as the lights around the Hall were extinguished. There were murmurs of appreciation and Astoria gasped, squeezing Nott’s arm even tighter. 

Zabini, whose bathroom ceiling was three times higher than the Great Hall, sniffed.

The Weird Sisters traipsed onto the stage and struck up a stately song. The champions (and Potter) rose with their partners to lead the first dance.

Against his will, Draco’s eyes found the dark-haired prat. He was spinning a Gryffindor girl in a pretty pink sari and their outfits clashed so awfully it was almost enough to make him smile. Everyone around him was clamouring, whispering, and that terrible loneliness was back. He glanced behind him to where Pansy was laughing with Nott, and Davis was chatting to Crabbe about the food. 

On the other side of the hall, Greengrass was silently standing among a cluster of Ravenclaws, a boy’s arm tight around her waist, looking rather tired. It was a startling realization that, at that moment, he had more in common with Daphne Greengrass than his other peers.

The music shifted into something more bearable and before he could even register it, Davis had tugged him into a fast-paced dance that was really more them just jumping and spinning each other round and round the hall. He grabbed Pansy’s hand as they danced past her and she rolled her eyes but went with him as he spun her into Nott’s waiting arms and collected Astoria for a quick lift. 

“Everything you imagined?” he asked and she beamed down at him from the air. 

“Even better! Everyone’s so pretty and the hall looks just like our aunt’s winter home!”

“And you’re going to bed by 10,” Greengrass joined them, wearing a white dress covered in silver beading. “We need to floo out by midday tomorrow!”

Astoria pulled a face and Nott quickly stepped in to sweep her away to the other side of the hall where she could see the musicians better. Pansy linked back with Draco, silks slightly ruffled but with a genuine smile on her face. 

“Daphne,” a Ravenclaw boy murmured, trailing a hand along her arm. “Come and dance,” he pulled her away, back to that circle of Ravenclaws she’d been stuck with for dinner.

“Marcus Turner,” Davis frowned, suddenly appearing next to them. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“She probably couldn't work out how to say no,” Draco stated and the three of them watched the two dance for a few moments before his attention was caught by Pansy’s loud laugh as she watched Bulstrode accidentally stand on Xavier’s shoes, despite his own apologies.

It felt decidedly strange to be younger than most of the people around him after how long he’d spent growing accustomed to holding power over the younger years - this new balance reminded him of family balls and being forced to play nice with the other heirs when all he really wanted to do was go and run around the gardens with Nott and Goyle. ~~He wished he could have been born a second son.~~ The only lower years he could see were Astoria and a Weasley brat who seemed to be fawning over Potter.

Some of the older Slytherins were lining the walls, looking regal and rather done with the whole affair. Davis, who’d gone alone and had been flitting through various dance partners for most of the night (much to the chagrin of her partners’ dates), pulled him back into another dance, pushing a glass of liquid into his hand. She winked at him and he drank it without really thinking, the pungent taste of alcohol spreading over his tongue. 

His gaze snapped back to the Slytherins talking among themselves at the side and he hesitated in his next spin before he saw Greengrass giggling and Bulstrode beaming as Xavier swayed her, the two of them talking about potions and obscure magical covens. Like she felt his gaze, she glanced up and smiled at him. 

His eyes continued to wander to the older years in other houses glaring at Nott as he danced with Astoria even as Nott didn’t acknowledge them. As Draco watched, he dipped her and she squealed excitedly, dragging him off to a chocolate fountain in the corner. Dorothy Nott, Draco remembered abruptly. His younger sister, she must have been 13? 14? She studied in Ilvermorny, with Nott’s aunt, and was barely a blip on the succession records. If Draco’s memory served, there was an engagement planned with the Flint family.

A few songs and twirls and sips from Davis’s firewhiskey later, Bulstrode ran up to him and hugged him so tightly it felt like hippogriff venom around his heart but… nice. 

She pulled back and leant her forehead on his shoulder, moving him into a slow sway back and forth. “This dancing is normal,” she whispered. “I wish this was _our_ normal.”

Draco scoffed. “If you think this is a dance, you haven’t learnt anything.”

Her eyes widened before-

He pulled her into a quick two-step and she laughed helplessly as they swirled together, lost in the crowd of students and for once feeling like Hogwarts was just that. _Hogwarts_ , with no stupid house divisions or yelling in the common room or-

She missed a step and the two of them fell out of sync. 

“Bulstrode?”

She nodded, slowly turning back to him. “Moody’s an asshole,” she whispered, squeezing his hand. Draco raised an eyebrow and turned to where the man was sitting in the corner of the room, a pure white ferret laid over his lap.

It wasn’t moving.

“I suppose he is,” Draco whispered. 

“Malfoy!” Crabbe yelled over the music. “Have you tried the snacks?” he asked, shoving a custard doughnut into his hand, beaming. “I was standing by the tables and these just appeared!”

“That’s interesting,” Draco acknowledged, turning to offer it to Bulstrode but she was already gone. A quick glance of the dance floor did reveal Pansy and Xavier Bousquet intertwined in a tight embrace to one of the Weird Sisters’ lesser-known love songs though.

“ _I’m wounded by your frowns, your pretty brown eyes,_

 _Oh, your words, they hit me down, helpless to your lies,_ ” the singer crooned. There was a scoff from behind them and Draco looked over to see Potter and Weasley slumped over on a bench, arms crossed. Not quite a love song then.

“Hey,” Draco made his way to Pansy and her new date. “Where’s Bulstrode?” 

Xavier shrugged, not pausing in his dance, leaning in to whisper something in Pansy’s ear. She smirked, but it looked more cruel than enticing.

Draco rolled his eyes and strode out to the gardens, snagging two drinks of butterbeer and cradling them in his hands next to the doughnut, the slight warmth helping ward off the chill.

(Crabbe blinked after him, standing alone by the wall with two full plates in his hands.)

Strolling down the fairy grotto outside of the castle, the glowing beings perched in bushes and around stone sculptures across the gardens, he tried to peer through the shadows and lights to find the other Slytherin. Would she have gone to the lake? No, it was far too cold for that.

Finally, he stopped, away from everyone else and free to breathe on his own.

Bulstrode looked up, stars twinkling above her.

“Here,” he handed her the butterbeer and the doughnut. “It's cold.”

“Good observation,” she nodded. “No wonder you don’t want me harming your grades.”

He glanced at her but she was smiling.

“Did you need air?” Draco asked, reclining against one of the stone reindeers littering the rose garden.

She huffed out a laugh at that. “In a way.”

He glanced behind him at the people dotted over the garden, most in pairs curled up together in nooks and crannies. Hesitantly, he sat next to her on the bench, crossing his arms to keep himself from shivering.

“Pansy and Bousquet are dancing together.”

She nodded, taking a long sip of the drink. “I kind of figured they would. We weren’t _together_ ,” she waved off his next question. “But that is a little,” she wrinkled her nose. “Annoying.” Quickly, she took another sip. 

He frowned. “Aren’t you going to ask if I mind? Pansy was meant to be my date.”

“Sorry,” Bulstrode snorted. “Were you two planning another scheme that hinged on you dating? If so, you need to improve your acting.”

“Is it really that unbelievable?” he asked curiously.

“Not for the reasons you’re thinking of,” she murmured, biting into the doughnut. “This is really good.”

“So why are you with him? … _were_ you with him?”

“We were chatting about potions after the first task, how you could prepare a vapour to knock the dragon out, and he asked me then. I knew no one else would so,” she shrugged. “I think he just thought that other girls would wanna dance with him more if he already had a partner. You know, scandal.”

“So part of why you said no to Zabini…”

“Was because I already had a date,” she finished. “So, sorry for ruining your big plan. Again. Here’s a question for you,” she said, tilting her head back to admire the lights strung over the columns and pillars around them. “When did you stop hating me?”

Draco blinked. “When did I start hating you?”

“Easy, first year, I took your Wiggentree bark and got twenty house points from Snape from how well separated it was. I never apologised for that.”

Draco’s mouth opened slightly, brows furrowing as he tried to remember. “That was before the troll, right?”

“Exactly,” she nodded, wrapping her fur scarf tighter in the chill. “God, I miss first year.”

“No, third was the best,” he told her. Their first year was full of dead unicorns and hooded figures in the forest while the second was about potentially dead students and his mother sending him an owl every hour to make sure he hadn’t been eaten by a giant snake.

“Even with the dangerous werewolf?” she challenged and he inhaled, remembering her hovering on the outskirts of his conversation with McGonagall at the start of the year. Of all the things he’d been expecting to learn this year, the fact that Millicent Bulstrode had a good memory was decidedly not one of them.

“Come on,” he muttered. “He’d never _actually_ hurt a student. Do you remember every conversation you hear?”

“Just the stupid ones,” she shrugged. “So why _me_ , Malfoy?” she turned to him. 

He hummed, thinking over his answer, not quite used to her sudden subject changes yet. _Why, indeed?_ “You’re a Slytherin,” he settled on. “So-”

He slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes suddenly wide.

“Anuzzer _what,_ precisely?” the Headmistress of Beauxbatons said, her tone icy.

“Another half-giant, o’ course!”

“‘Ow dare you!” shrieked the woman. “I ‘have nevair been more insulted in my life! ‘Alf-giant? Moi? I ‘ave- I ‘ave big bones!” she stormed off towards the castle, sending flurries of fairies spiralling into the air. 

Slowly, he removed his hand and they just stared at each other. 

“One day we’ll have a moment without hearing something like that,” she sighed.

“I should tell my father,” Draco said, without really thinking about it. 

“Remember what McGonagall said about Lupin at the start of the year?” Bulstrode shook her head. “Dumbledore will’ve chosen him for a reason. There’s no way you could get rid of him that easily.” 

Draco was still smiling though and he started to run down the twisting paths back into the hall.

Bulstrode cursed, jolting after him. “Where are you _going_?” she panted and he grinned back at her.

“I need to find Pansy.”

Eventually, a little past midnight, they ended up in the girls' dorm with another cracked open bottle of firewhiskey that they were slowly passing around. Crabbe was sitting against the headboard of Davis’s bed with her, Nott perched on the end while Bulstrode and Draco were sprawled over her bed. Goyle was sleeping on the small couch in the corner, Greengrass’s cloak draped over him (Draco couldn’t wait to see his reaction to _that_ when he finally woke up.) and Xavier Bousquet had had to go and help some of his drunk friends back to their carriage but had promised to keep an eye out for them, kissing Pansy’s cheek as a goodbye. There were red marks over the back of her neck.

“Did you _see_ Roger Davies’ shoes?” Greengrass squealed from the floor, words slurring slightly and instantly excitable about every change in topic. The alcohol had hit her, and hard. (As promised, Astoria had been escorted back to the common room for 10 o’clock though Nott had played a game of snap with her and they all knew she would likely be up until midnight anyway telling her friends everything.)

Pansy nodded excitedly, surrounded by wrapping paper from the presents they’d been steadily opening. She’d discarded her silk gloves to dig into a packet of Belgian truffles and her hair had almost doubled in size from the heat, fluffing out around her face. “They must have been Hornback leather, how _nice_ -”

Bulstrode’s head fell onto Draco’s shoulder, yawning.

“Crabbe, are you melting the chocolate?” Nott leant over the bed to stare at Crabbe who grinned happily at him.

“This way, even if you get a bad one, it still tastes nice!” he grinned, gesturing at the boxes of beans over the bed and Davis ‘ooh’ed in amazement. 

“Go on then,” Draco said, curious despite himself about just how much control Crabbe would have.

To their collective surprise, he didn’t even reach for his wand, just narrowed his eyes.

After a few moments, the chocolate frog in his left hand started to melt over his Bertie Bott’s Beans. 

The group exploded in shock. “Where have you been hiding that?” Greengrass exclaimed and Bulstrode nodded a firm agreement, staring at the chocolate with her mouth open. 

“Dad says I gotta skill for fire magic,” Crabbe chewed his way through the confectionery and Draco thought he was rather lucky his ‘dad’ wasn't there to punish him for the breach of etiquette. “Keeps tryna get me to practise.”

“I don’t think you have skill for any kind of magic,” Pansy smiled sweetly at him and his shoulder slumped. Privately, Draco thought it made sense that Crabbe was so proud of it - there wasn’t much else his father complimented him for.

“Oo, me next!” Davis giggled, zeroing in on the biggest parcel in the pile. Draco stifled a small smile when she gasped.

“That’s a good model,” Bulstrode stated, glancing over the label even through her drooping eyes and long exhales. Davis was frozen, staring at the large golden telescope.

“It's got amethysts and sarsen inlaid in its focuser and metal,” Draco told her. “For protection and all that,” he waved a hand. “Astronomy nonsense.”

Davis gaped at him before her eyes softened. “Merry Christmas, Draco,” she grinned.

“Happy Yuletide, Tracey,” he muttered back, eyelids fluttering closed. The alcohol was making the world outside of their little bubble dissolve into nothingness.

A small part of Draco wondered about Zabini, whether or not he was alone in their dorm, wondering about the rest of them. 

Nott said something and Bulstrode laughed and the others joined in, presents and paper strewn across the floor.

They were glowing - the atmosphere tinged with the heady buzz of firewhiskey and the euphoric feeling of magic, their eight cores practically vibrating in joy from the company. 

And they were all just so hopelessly, hopelessly _happy_.

Draco blinked down at the owl, the words taking a while to register.

_Dearest Draco,_

_Your father and I are rather occupied with the landscaping in the western courtyards, there shall be less communication between us than there would have been otherwise. Nevertheless, I intend to be kept informed on your progress._

_Stay strong, the chill is coming in._

_Your loving mother,_

_Narcissa Malfoy_

_(PS: The Weedosoros potion is best created by slicing the ash bark a moon cycle before the brewing.)_

It was signed with a neat drawing of a small dragon wrapped around a narcissus stem, stars twinkling above it.

Hyperion cooed and he sighed, raising a hand to scratch at the eagle owl’s chin. “I know.”

The moon was glowing through the open windows and the Owlery was lit up like a fae clearing. Draco looked back down at the paper clutched in his hand.

It was a sharp contrast to the spiralling pages she would have sent before and he was eerily reminded of the letters Crabbe received from his father. It wasn't a welcome comparison and he creased the parchment in half, summoning a flame at the tip of his wand with a quiet 'incendio'. He watched the letter burn silently. She _did_ care, just… not as much as Zabini’s mother or Greengrass’s father did.

He _knew_ he should have gone home for Yule, he should have spoken to his parents in person about Moody and Hagrid and _everything_.

“You nearly ready to go?” Crabbe whispered from where he was standing guard outside, the only person willing to trust Draco’s gut feeling that Hyperion had received a message even at this time of night. The only negative to having an underground common room was that owls couldn’t freely travel in and out.

“Yes,” Draco straightened, giving Hyperion one final scratch and whispering goodbye. He already knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, no matter how many custard doughnuts he ate.

“These plants are extremely delicate!” Sprout called from the front of the greenhouse. “Be careful of the people around you!”

Draco wiped at the sweat beading over his forehead. The three furnaces were all on and roaring for the plants to thrive despite the rain battering down the windows.

There was a leak in one of the panes and water was dripping onto Crabbe’s shoulder in a steady pulse. A few of the Ravenclaws snickered.

Zabini looked up and met Draco’s gaze with a harsh sneer. Flicking his wand, Bulstrode’s plant froze, perishing in the cold temperatures.

Promptly, she reached across to bodily shove his plant off of the table, shattering the pot and immediately killing it.

Pansy was gossiping with Potter's Yule Ball date, someone Draco had been sure was a Gryffindor, and her plant seemed to be in tatters around the table.

Greengrass tripped, the tail end of a leaf igniting in the small furnace. Less than a second later and the entire plant had crumbled to ash. Through some miracle, her skin remained unstained, even as the rest of them got steadily covered in muck.

Sprout closed her eyes. “Collect a new Hydnorus, Miss Greengrass. And...” she glanced over the destruction of the rest of the class before landing on Crabbe. “Your Hydnorus is going to _die,_ Mr Crabbe,” she sighed. “Rescue it from the rain.”

Crabbe flushed, trying to move the plant away from the leak without jostling it too much (really, who knew what wouldn’t kill them?).

Draco admitted it was rather strange that Crabbe was the target of Sprout’s wrath when Tracey’s plant was smoking and his own had tried to impale itself on his shears in some form of ritual suicide less than twenty seconds earlier.

A Ravenclaw girl pushed Bulstrode’s new plant off the table, mouthing ‘bitch’ to her. Bulstrode rolled her eyes, not making any move to go and get a new one. “Sorry Zabini thinks I’m more attractive than you.” The girl spluttered.

“Ten minutes!” Sprout yelled.

Goyle smiled wickedly before tapping his plants left frond, leaving it to lash out at Nott’s, setting off a chain reaction down to where Zabini’s new plant was perched on the edge of the table, in perfect position to-

The plant fell into the furnace in a rush of smoke.

Suddenly, Draco was reminded that Goyle was a Slytherin.

Zabini gritted his teeth, throwing his gloves down in annoyance.

The bell rang and the entire class slumped gratefully.

“Detention,” Sprout ground out. “Meet me here at 8, Mr Crabbe.”

“What-?” Nott raised his head before Pansy elbowed him. 

“Now get out,” she waved a hand, running the other down her face. 

“Yes, professor,” they muttered as they all traipsed out of the greenhouse, leaves and scorch stains up and down their sleeves.

“ _Extremely_ _delicate_ ,” she repeated.

“Come on, come on!” Pansy rushed ahead of them, looking gleeful. “I want to see who our replacement is, there’s no way they’d let that oaf teach again-” she cut herself off with a squeal as they all caught sight of an elderly witch standing in front of a unicorn pen.

Pansy’s face suddenly went very blank.

Draco’s mind whirred before he remembered the portrait in her father’s study - her grandfather standing proudly over the corpses of three dead unicorns, horns clasped in his grip. When he spoke to them, he gestured with his hands, silvery blood from the horns running down his arms.

“Girls over here!” Professor Grubbly-Plank called and Pansy drifted towards the creature. It was so white it made the fresh snow around it look like the rocks on Bulstrode's beach.

Draco yawned despite himself, tuning out of the chorus of gasps to watch Nott and Goyle arm wrestle over a fallen tree. Goyle was winning. 

His gaze flickered over to where the golden boy himself was muttering to Weasley about Hagrid and what could be wrong with him.

Draco snatched the Skeeter article from Crabbe’s pocket and sauntered over to them. “He hasn’t been attacked, Potter, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, he’s just too ashamed to show his big, ugly face.”

“What do you mean?” Potter said sharply, instantly suspicious.

Draco brandished the article, waving it back and forth like a treat. “There you go. Hate to break it to you, Potter…”

He snatched the paper, hunching over it with his Gryffindor lackeys. 

A few minutes of Draco wondering if Potter needed his glasses checked if it took him that long to read a single article later and Potter was spitting rebuttals at him like they would actually matter.

“What’s this rubbish about him” - he gestured at Crabbe - “getting a bad bite off of a Flobberworm? They haven’t even got teeth!”

“Well, I think this should put an end to the oaf’s teaching career,” Draco said, eyes glinting. “Half-giant, and there was me thinking he'd just swallowed a bottle of Skele-Gro when he was young. None of the mummies and daddies are going to like this at all… they’ll all be worried he’ll eat their kids,” he cut himself off with a laugh, one Crabbe returned, now standing with Nott and Goyle and looking rather interested in the proceedings.

“Are you paying attention over there?” Grubbly-Plank called and the Slytherins turned back to her, openly curious about what an _actual_ Care lesson would be like.

Behind them, Potter was still visibly seething and Draco pushed down another laugh. 

“One of the primary uses of unicorns in wizarding society is in wand cores - Ollivander, in particular, employs the use of unicorn hair and some eastern European countries use powdered unicorn horns in theirs with,” she wrinkled her nose. “Varying results. Does anyone know what unicorns symbolise?”

Around a third of the class raised their hands and Grubbly-Plank nodded in pride. 

“You, at the back!”

“Purity,” Crabbe answered softly and some Gryffindors laughed. “And corruption.”

“Fifteen house points,” Grubbly-Plank smiled. “Not many people remember that last one. Do you know why they represent both? Yes, with the brown hair?”

“Unicorns, like most magical beings, are creatures of two natures - they can be dark or light, typically dependent on the moon cycle,” Granger recited. Next to him, Nott groaned and Draco snorted. “The balance is important to ensure that their magic isn’t unstable but instead is able to exist in its natural form.”

“Ten house points,” Grubbly-Plank nodded, looking slightly taken aback. “Naturally though, unicorns are _very_ pure creatures - they can be darkened or used to purify yourself; there’s a myth that bathing in unicorn tears on a blue moon will regain you of any innocence lost. The balance is not always perfectly halfway and typically unicorns exist at an around 90-10 split towards the light.”

“What’re wizards?” an Irish Gryffindor asked, looking rather intrigued.

“Magical muggles, mate,” another Gryffindor grinned, snickering as the Irish one elbowed him playfully. 

“Around 70-30,” Grubbly-Plank nodded at him. “Though magic is not truly damaged until it falls past 40-60, towards the dark. If the difference gets any further than 20-80, magical damage to your core is both irreversible and unavoidable.”

Pansy slipped back over to them, a strand of unicorn hair clinging to her scarf. Her hands were shaking and Draco squeezed her shoulder. Across from him, Potter frowned and it only took Draco a look at the distance between him and his supposed Yule date to see why. Biting down a smile, he leant down to whisper ‘work with me’ in Pansy’s ear. She glanced at him but didn’t move when he wound his arms around her, tucking her chin under his head.

Nott did give them a weird look but he shrugged it off at Pansy’s muttered explanation of the cold.

As Grubbly-Plank’s lecture continued, his thoughts tracked back over to Potter. He didn’t even mean to, Potter just tended to cross his mind and stay there like a particularly stubborn patch of mould. Honestly, if Lupin were to walk back in with a boggart, Draco wouldn’t be surprised to see Potter staring at him with disgust crawling over his features.

“Malfoy,” Crabbe whispered and Draco turned to him. “What do you think my balance is?”

“You need to be magical to have a balance,” Pansy chimed in. “Isn't it lucky you’re such a squib?” she smiled at Crabbe, Nott laughing next to them.

“Not necessarily!” Grubbly-Plank called out to them. “Muggles are born in a state of 50-50, with no damage ensuing from decisions meaning it simply fluctuates frantically from day to day!”

“Then 5-95,” Nott clapped Crabbe on the back. “You still owe me twenty galleons from a bet in second year.”

The Beauxbatons’ students tittered, laughing together in fast-paced French. Draco snorted at an offhand remark and a girl beamed at him.

“So you were gonna go to Beauxbatons?” Crabbe asked curiously, Greengrass’s puffskein perched on his shoulder.

“Hear me out!” Draco heard a Weasley say. “That, but _smaller_. It's genius!”

“No,” Draco sighed. “Father wanted Durmstrang or Beauxbatons and mother wanted Hogwarts. It was never an actual discussion.”

“Like most things involving Draco and his parents!” Nott cut in, Tracey trailing after him.

“Funny,” Draco sneered and Nott grinned at him. 

Pansy shot them a look from her place next to Xavier, hands intertwined as he whispered to her.

“Reckon we should ask them about the covens in the south of France?” Tracey nodded at him and he snorted, obligingly slapping his hand against hers when she held it out. He was convinced there was no pattern to when she decided to do it but it made her happy and that meant one less potential enemy when Goyle and Zabini’s rivalry blew up in all of their faces. 

“The french countryside is an acquired taste,” he defended. “You should see their farmer’s markets!”

“Oh yeah?” she humoured him. “Do wizards not have takeaways or…?”

Draco blinked at her.

She sat up. “Draco, do you know what a burrito is?”

“I’m not stupid,” he elbowed her, rolling his eyes. 

“Then answer me.”

Their eyes met in challenge. 

“I know what a burrito is.”

Tracey cocked an eyebrow. “Go on then. _Explain_ one. _Define_ it.”

“Hagrid’s back,” Greengrass announced, slipping onto a nearby bench and cracking open a textbook. 

Pansy’s quill snapped. So did Draco’s good mood.

“No matter,” she quickly recovered. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Won’t there at least be an investigation?” Crabbe asked. “I mean, he’s a _giant_!”

“No proof,” Greengrass smiled sweetly at him.

“Yet,” Pansy smiled back. A Gryffindor walked past them, caught Xavier’s eyes and blushed pink, giggling. Pansy’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“You really can be a bitch can’t you?” Bulstrode breathed but it looked more like a compliment than anything else. Pansy glanced at her and her eyes caught like there was something new in the curve of Bulstrode’s nose, the colour of her eyes. Bulstrode held her gaze.

“Of course,” Pansy murmured before straightening. “You can go,” Pansy waved a hand and Xavier stilled.

“What?” 

Pansy looked up. “Leave. I don’t really need a relationship with you right now,” she waved at him. “Or ever, really.”

“Then _why_ ,” he ground out, accent coming out heavier. “Did we ‘ave such a connection? You felt it too, you-”

“Felt it as much as Brown, Patil and Bones,” she smiled up at him. A few of the other Beauxbatons jeered, not even making a move to defend their friend. “Were you trying to collect the whole house set or something? An admirable goal but,” she shrugged. “I’m waiting till marriage.”

At that, Nott laughed, leaning back on his bench and clearly enjoying himself. Pansy threw him a wink.

“Bulstrode,” she smiled. “Tell him to go.”

Bulstrode grinned. “Fuck off, Xavier.”

Bousquet turned on his heel and stormed off in the direction the Gryffindor girl had gone. 

A bunch of Beauxbatons’ clustered around Pansy, curious about the dismissal and more than a few interested in what had just happened between her and Bulstrode.

Draco pulled back from the crowd slightly to spy Zabini standing alone. Before he could think better of it, he walked over to where his housemate was leaning against the wall. 

“You should tell Crabbe about the divorce.”

Zabini frowned. “Do you think I’m suicidal?”

“I wish,” Draco sighed. “But to be manipulated by something _that_ basic? It's disgraceful for a Slytherin. Don’t let someone use it against you again.” 

“And I should trust you because?”

“I thought she would say yes,” he answered honestly and Zabini smiled slightly. Draco smiled back, obviously fake.

“Women rarely do what you think they will.”

Unbidden, an image of Tracey crying outside of the Astronomy tower came to his mind, Bulstrode by the lake, Pansy glaring down her nose at Moody, his mother penning a letter so short it might have been one of Crabbe’s sweet wrappers before drawing _their_ symbol in such a careful way. He hummed.

“And Draco?”

He looked up.

“Use your name against me again and I’ll have you castrated.”

This time, Draco’s smile was real. “Alright.” 

He left without fanfare, pushing off the wall to return to where Crabbe was entertaining the French by singing their cloaks with his fingers alone.

The common room was quiet, the older years out playing what they had assured Snape would be a friendly game of Slytherin Quidditch (a variant founded by Crabbe’s great-grandfather that involved four bludgers, copious injuries and absolutely no referees), the youngers already in bed at the late hour of 10:30, complaining about a painful Defence lesson, and the third and fifth years at their Astronomy lessons. It was just the nine of them.

Someone jumped onto his sofa, laughing to themself. Draco sighed.

“What do you want, Tracey?”

“I don’t want anything, I _need_ your Herbology essay,” she grinned at him, perched upside down like an overgrown bat with a sandwich clasped in one hand. He couldn’t quite stop himself from picturing her next to Snape, both in black cloaks and both messing with the first years. His lip twitched.

“No pears?” he asked innocently, glancing at the food and Crabbe _beamed_ from the other sofa at understanding the joke. 

Pansy glared at him. She'd been on edge since she'd dismissed Xavier, like she had been expecting something to happen but it _hadn't._ “Draco, you’re acting like a Hufflepuff.”

“Hufflepuffs can be surprisingly useful,” Crabbe mumbled. “One helped me find my old Charms essay the other day.”

“Ugh,” Pansy muttered back.

Draco scanned over the new letter from his mother. As promised, it was no bigger than Tracey’s sandwich but his gaze was lingering on one particular phrase. _Born three days ago about two minutes after sunset._

Astoria stumbled into the common room, sobbing and clutching at her tattered cloak.

They erupted into concern, rushing over, and Draco was walking to her before he’d even fully taken in the scene.

“What happened?” Nott was asking, Bulstrode was gasping and Goyle was frozen, halfway off his seat and halfway to tears. 

“There-” she hiccupped. “They hit- there’s-”

She held up her cloak, displaying slashed singes across her back, the material beyond natural repair.

“What did you do?” Greengrass demanded, clasping Astoria’s shoulders desperately and shaking her.

“Nothing!” Astoria cried, rubbing at her face. 

Strangely, Draco’s first thought was of that muggle-born second year. Thinking back, he could barely remember catching sight of him at all recently - was he sleeping somewhere else?

“Well we’ve never been attacked,” Pansy drawled. She hadn't even tried to approach the sisters, the new Witch Weekly in her lap artfully turned to a page on creature discrimination and why you shouldn’t feel _that_ bad if you engaged in it. “So you must have provoked them in some way.”

Greengrass shot her a glare that could have killed her Hydnorus plant. “I’ll speak to Flitwick, we can trace the magical signature-”

“No-”

“Yes!” Greengrass straightened her sister’s robes. “That’s not negotiable, Astoria.”

The younger clenched her fists and stormed up to her dorm.

Tracey bit her lip, chewing on her sandwich. “Daph, if she’s sure you shouldn’t make her-”

“She could have been hurt!” Greengrass stressed. “It's a miracle it was just her shirt-”

“No,” Bulstrode shook her head. “Her clothes are all warded with protection spells, same with yours. You can sense it if you really try, it's why you never get dirty in Herbology. You should trust her.”

Draco blinked at her but the rest of them had already moved on.

“Daphne’s got a point,” Goyle said. “It's her sister, her family, but maybe if you just trusted Astoria-”

“Well, whose side are you on?” Pansy challenged and Goyle froze.

“We’re neutral parties!” Nott wound an arm around his shoulders. “Just observing.”

“I don’t see why we need sides,” Goyle spat. “Zabini’s the only asshole who’s ever really in the wrong.”

“Did Bulstrode teach you that word?” Zabini asked from his armchair. He’d been so quiet that Draco had forgotten he was even there. “Not very ladylike.”

Bulstrode snarled at him, hand on her wand as she pushed up, leaning over Tracey’s sofa to glare at him. Zabini didn’t back down, leaning forward over Tracey’s ponytail. “I’ll fucking show you ladylike, you privileged fuckwit.”

Tracey took another bite from her sandwich.

“Why don’t we all just calm down,” Crabbe stammered.

“Crabbe, my mother caused your parents’ divorce,” Zabini sneered at him and Crabbe froze. “There, done!” he spread his arms at Draco. “Is all forgiven?”

“Stop!” Nott yelled but Zabini was insulting Bulstrode’s father and Bulstrode's wand was out and Pansy was sneering about Zabini’s mother and Greengrass was pleading his defence and it was really only a matter of time before-

“Does anyone have an excuse to offer?” Snape drawled. 

“Bulstrode cast first,” Zabini told him, perfectly calm. “I acted in self-defence.”

“Zabini was out of line, goading her,” Pansy refuted. “He started the argument.”

Bulstrode swallowed, staring at her.

“Technically, _Astoria_ started the argument,” Zabini sneered and the group stiffened as Snape’s eyes narrowed.

“Astoria Greengrass?”

“I wasn’t aware of another Astoria in this school,” Draco shrugged, annoyed that he had to sit through the inevitable lecture when he’d made a point to avoid the confrontation, even with the ‘coward!’ Zabini had slung at him.

“And the rest of you decided to… what? _Join_ in?” Snape pulled the words out, long and low.

“Tracey shattered the window,” Bulstrode blurted out. 

Tracey sputtered. “Yeah, cause you tried to hex me!” she looked around, mouth open ready to accuse someone but clearly drawing a blank. “Draco doesn’t know what a bloody burrito is!”

“What does that have to do-”

“Davis-” 

“ _Wow-_ ”

“Focus!” Snape rapped his wand against the table and they all fell quiet. “On the topic of who’s at fault for each particular spell, who destroyed the fireplace?”

All eyes turned to Crabbe.

Snape’s eyebrows raised slightly. “I see. That was some strong magic.”

Pansy snorted. “He could've just fallen into it. Would've done the same amount of damage.”

Snape shot her a warning glare.

Crabbe blinked, staring at him. “Thank you, sir.”

Snape hummed. “Get out and fix the common room or you’ll all have detention until the _next_ Triwizard Tournament.”

“Yes, professor,” they all droned, shuffling out. Zabini strolled away and they all winced as the door banged shut behind them.

“Anyone know any time reversal spells?” Tracey tried weakly.

“This is _not_ gonna become some Back to the Future story,” Bulstrode glared at her. “Just clear up _your_ mess-”

“This is _just_ what happened!” Draco yelled. “Let’s fix it, get some rest, and annoy the crap out of each other in the morning!”

He didn’t wait for a response, just strode out of there to start on the extensive task they’d given themselves.

“Did you teach him the word crap or did I?” he heard Tracey ask Bulstrode.

“I think it was Crabbe,” Bulstrode answered, eyes wide.

“I have a little brother,” Crabbe whispered, eyes squeezed shut like Draco would hit him.

“Congratulations,” the blond intoned as they walked down Hogsmeade’s main street, eyes peeled for the shop. He needed to cheer himself up after how boring the second task had been. “Name?”

Crabbe snorted. “Vincent.”

“Vincent Crabbe III,” Draco nodded to himself. “Repetitive.”

“I’m not exactly a Crabbe anymore,” Crabbe said. “So he’s Vincent Crabbe II.”

“Vincent Abbott then?” Draco asked. 

“I don’t know,” Crabbe shrugged, rubbing at his neck. “I don’t know anything.”

“True,” Draco murmured. “Here,” he clicked his fingers, ducking into the small shop full of owl treats and accessories. 

Nodding at the shop owner, a kindly dark-haired man with laugh lines, he found his way to the section he wanted.

“I had a French accent until I was 11,” Draco shrugged. “Spent the months before Hogwarts stressing it would come back.”

Crabbe blinked. “What?”

“A secret,” Draco told him, examining a row of owl foods. “An exchange.”

Crabbe’s eyebrows furrowed. “But I _knew_ that.”

“And I knew about your brother,” Draco’s eyes flicked to him. “Born four days ago about two minutes after sunset.”

Crabbe’s mouth fell open.

“Which means there’s no reason for you to hang out with me anymore,” Draco waved a hand. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“What? Malfoy, no-”

A yelp interrupted them and Draco yanked him to the window, frowning out at the treeline.

Behind another shop, he saw the edge of a blue scarf whip around a building into an alley.

The urge to stay put itched under his skin until-

 _“Coward!” Zabini yelled, blocking a curse and knocking Crabbe to the side. “Do_ something _!”_

Draco gritted his teeth. “Come on.” 

Crabbe sucked in a breath but he was following, he was always following. Draco smiled.

They drew to a stop by the alley, both nodding at each other before peering in.

Draco’s eyes widened.

Three older Ravenclaws were standing around a third year Slytherin, the kid bleeding down his hands. Draco swallowed. This could have been Astoria. 

“Death Eater,” he heard one of them mutter. “Killed my fucking mother you little-”

“Afflicto,” Draco twisted his wand and the boy choked, leg giving out on him, twisted out awkwardly. 

“Mate,” one of them asked, bending down to help but he shoved them away, trying to stand back up but only worsening the damage.

“I-” Crabbe looked at him before nodding, copying his motion. “Afflicto!” 

The final one hissed in a breath, his nose clicking out of place and making blood begin to stream down his face.

The third year scrambled upwards and sprinted out of the alley, hopefully back to his friends.

Draco hummed, satisfied with the damage, and turned back on his heel.

“Well done,” he threw over his shoulder, already heading back to The Three Broomsticks for another drink of butterbeer before they had to go back.

Behind him, Crabbe lit up.

“Curses are only used out of necessity!” Moody declared, pacing around the front of the classroom. 

If he was surprised by the change in the seating plan (ie. Zabini and Goyle in separate corners, Pansy and Draco in front of his desk, Nott and Bulstrode behind them, Greengrass alone by the door, Crabbe against the window and Tracey stranded somewhere in the middle) he damned well didn’t show it. 

“Only one of you understood that!” he slapped an essay onto Pansy’s desk, marked with just a perfect ‘O’ in the upper corner, a sharp contrast to the ink scrawled all over Draco’s own (marked with a humiliating ‘P’). 

Nott, who she had copied off of, sat up, affronted, but Moody was already moving on.

“Greengrass, what are the effects of the Aqua Eructo charm?”

“It creates a spout of water from the wand at varying intensities.”

“Nott, what colour?”

Nott blinked, still frowning at his essay. “Blue.” 

“Wrong!” Moody declared. “ _Ice_ blue! That distinction could be the thing that keeps your head on your shoulders! Let's hope you don’t mess it up when it's needed.”

Pansy yawned. Forty-seven minutes left.

_Necessary things… things like their common room seating and the sofas they had yet to collect. How many chairs could nine people ever really sit in?_

“Don’t tune me out, boy,” Moody crouched down, lips curled into a cruel parody of a smile. “Thinking about your father? His _glory_ days? When he would string up muggles in the streets to watch their bones crack one,” he rapped his knuckles on Draco’s desk in a steady rhythm. “By. One. Can you imagine the _sounds_ , boy? The squelching?”

Draco couldn’t stop the shiver that ran through him. Pansy looked away like she couldn’t bear to see his weakness. 

“Or are you thinking of the mudbloods they sapped of magic until they were just husks, too helpless to even breathe on their own?”

Bulstrode’s eyes were clenched shut and her shoulders were shaking. Tracey just looked tired.

“Your parents are _filth_. Zabini, curse Mr Malfoy here and see if he’s been paying enough attention to deflect it.”

If Draco was stupid, he’d say Zabini hesitated before hitting him with the strongest blinding jinx he knew.

There weren’t any debates in the common room that evening and Draco _wished_ he could have just blamed Moody.

“All I’m saying,” Pansy said, hands up. “Is that he’s someone I wouldn’t mind wearing yellow for.”

Nott laughed out loud. “Pans, have I told you how much I love you recently?”

“Say it again,” she winked and he grinned down at her from his seat in the stands above them. She wound her arm back around Draco’s, the two of them huddled together.

Zabini and Greengrass were miles away with a group of Durmstrang girls but the rest of them were together, once again united in their need for gossip.

“I still think Delacour could pull this off,” Bulstrode told Tracey. “Blow them all out of the water ya know?”

“I’ll take that bet,” Tracey grinned, pulling out a few sickles. “My money’s still on Diggory, I feel like he’s got the intuition needed for this.”

“What a poor spectator sport,” Nott remarked, not for the first time. He was tapping his foot awkwardly and idly spinning a time turner between his fingers.

A scream echoed through the air.

“Charming,” Draco took a sip from his mug, steam wafting up, slightly cold even with how warm the night was. 

“Wanna see who can name the most constellations?” Tracey nudged him and he glanced at the sky.

“Ursa Minor.”

“Hercules.”

“Virgo.”

“Ophiuchus.”

“Cygnus.”

“Canes Venatici.”

“Ursa Major.”

“Coma Berenices, Crater, Corvus, Corona Borealis, Leo Minor, Lynx-”

“That’s cheating!” Draco sputtered and she grinned at him.

“No, that’s _strategy_.”

“I’m gonna destroy you in chess later,” he muttered and she laughed.

Crabbe jolted up, staring out across the maze.

The air was suddenly very charged and very silent.

Some of the older Slytherins were frowning down at their forearms, one pulling up his shirt to stare blankly at his veins. He felt the same, like a ghost had kissed the scarred skin. He saw Crabbe shiver slightly next to him, despite his usual heat.

“Do you feel that?” Pansy murmured and there were vague nods of assent. 

Subtly, Bulstrode inched a little further away from them, scrunching her nose up in regret.

Tracey was giving him a weird look and he realised he was scratching his forearm, the hippogriff scar twitching under his flesh. He shrugged at her but her expression didn’t change. He gazed out at the maze, a thin mist curling over the hedges and hiding the path from view.

“This kinda reminds me of the World Cup,” Bulstrode muttered weakly. Crabbe was so still, Draco wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t managed to accidentally hex himself. “You know. All the banners and yelling.”

No one was yelling now.

“Malfoy?” Vincent whispered, still stock-still. “Does yours,” he jerked his arm and Draco nodded slowly.

“Yes.” 

Potter slammed into the ground and the stands erupted into chaos and cheers. Potter was cradling a yellow figure, scrambling away from the cup. Draco heard Bulstrode curse, handing Tracey her money as the other girl laughed in victory. Draco leant over the side, peering down at where the teachers were swarming towards Potter. Snape looked particularly pale.

“Is he alright?” Pansy asked quietly next to him. “He looks a little worse for wear.”

Draco swallowed. Blood was matting his dark hair down and his red uniform was nearly covered in mud and scratches. 

A reporter began to shove her way to the group, eagerly yelling out the words she heard. Whispers began to flurry up the stands and Draco saw Zabini’s head snap to the yellow figure.

“Cedric’s dead!” a Hufflepuff near them gasped. A Ravenclaw clapped a hand to his mouth, leaning into a Gryffindor’s shoulder.

Draco just blinked, staring down at the mass of people and noise knotted around the two on the ground.

“No!” a Ravenclaw girl shrieked, tears streaming down her face. “No, you're lying, you’re-” she scrambled down the stands, stumbling over people and bags until she was ushered to the side by one of the teachers and pulled into a hug. “No, no, Cedric!” she wailed. Cho Chang, Draco realised. The Ravenclaw seeker and Diggory’s Yule date.

The people still gathering around Potter were screaming, crying, falling.

The reporter looked up from her parchment, eyes wide. “He’s back!” she called up to the stands and the crowd faded into white noise.

He heard Nott’s quiet ‘no’ and suddenly Pansy’s casual grip on his arm got a lot stronger. 

Draco gazed up at the table at the front of the hall. Moody, the _real_ Moody, was sitting there, metal flask in hand and wearing some of the other teachers’ spare robes. Flitwick dropped his cup and Moody flinched violently. A dark part of him imagined the Moody he knew twitching in fear like that and he smiled.

“Why the fuck did we have to toast _him_?” Pansy seethed, clearly unimpressed at Dumbledore's big speech on unity. “We all know he’s the whole reason Diggory’s dead.”

“But he survived,” Bulstrode said. “Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Yeah, that he’s an insignificant cockroach who’ll be squashed by the next shoe that comes along,” Pansy rolled her eyes. “I survive every day and I don’t get toasted.”

The muggle-born was at the end of the table, twiddling his thumbs. Alone. 

“Bartimaeus can either mean son of honour or uncleanness,” Tracey nudged Draco. “Kinda interesting, that it coulda gone either way I guess.”

“I guess,” Draco echoed. “Hey,” he muttered to Nott who turned to him. “Moody - our Moody - was a Death Eater?” Nott nodded, eyes narrowed. “But he was-”

“An asshole?” Bulstrode cocked an eyebrow. “Like a Death Eater generally is?”

Draco shrugged.

Bartemius Crouch Jr was a Death Eater. So was his father. So was Vincent’s father and Nott’s father and Goyle’s father and Pansy’s parents. So was his mother. 

Draco chewed on the inside of his cheek. 

“You-Know-Who is _dead_ ,” Goyle said, wringing his hands. “Right?” 

“Right,” Nott nodded.

Draco stared down at his empty plate. All he could think of was that hooded figure in the forest, drinking slowly, steadily at that unicorn’s wound, silver blood pooling over the forest floor.

“ _So_ , what if Potter killed Diggory?”

“I don’t think Harry Potter could even breathe near Cedric Diggory without him noticing,” Pansy declared. “There’s no way he’d be able to _kill_ him.”

“What if Potter’s hiding his true skills?” Nott acknowledged. “What if when he was a baby, the dark magic that was dormant lashed out and defeated the greater evil, putting him in the position to be the next Dark Lord?”

Draco frowned, thinking of Potter stumbling over himself at the Yule Ball. “We are talking about the same Potter, right?”

“What others’re left?”

“Blaise!” Greengrass gasped.

“What, is that too far?” he rolled his eyes, sliding into the bench. “I’m sorry to have missed the big speech, I heard it was lovely.”

“And when you could use the advice so much,” Goyle smirked and the group laughed quietly. Zabini’s gaze sharpened.

“Come on,” Bulstrode tapped Draco’s shoulder, leaving the hall. He glanced at the group before Pansy made a quick shooing motion and he hurried after her.

She was already gone by the time he left the hall but he didn’t even have to think about it before he was walking down to the lake past the olive grove. 

She was perched on a large rock, staring out at the waters.

“My uncle died when I was 7, from a stroke. He was a muggle, and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have just saved him. I _still_ don’t understand.” She fell quiet. “We could have saved him. Here,” she straightened, throwing him a smooth stone. 

She turned to the lake and threw her own, the rock bouncing over the surface six times before vanishing into the depths. She nodded at him and he exhaled.

Twisting his hand, he skipped the stone over the lake. Two bounces. He grinned at her and she smiled back.

“You’re not all bad, Malfoy.”

He scoffed. “Thanks.”

“It's shitty weather,” she glanced up at the grey clouds drifting over the horizon despite the usual end of year sunshine. “Reckon it means something?”

“You’re the one that does Divination.”

“Give me two twigs and a magnifying glass,” she shook her head. “I’d know how the _world_ ended. Look,” she pushed her hands into her pockets. “I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

“So?”

“So, Draco Malfoy,” she lifted an arm over his shoulders like she was knighting him. “You’re officially my friend. Don’t do anything stupid over summer.”

“I never do stupid things,” Draco frowned. 

Millicent leant back, the wind ghosting over her cheeks. “But if you _do_ mess up,” she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Tell me.” 

“Why you?”

She smiled slightly. “Why not? Who else do you trust?”

“You should come to mine at some point,” Tracey declared. “You _need_ to eat a burrito Draco Malfoy and if I have to force it down your throat I will!”

“Burrito?” Vincent tilted his head and Tracey looked heartbroken. 

“Oh my God, you poor privileged twats,” she shook her head. “I swear I’ll right these wrongs.”

“What’s your flooing address?” Draco asked but Tracey just waved a hand. 

“Dad charmed the fires with anti-flooing agents, just meet me in Birmingham?”

“Birmingham,” Draco considered the unfamiliar word. It sounded a little like Buckingham, which he knew was the muggle’s supposed seat of power so it must be fairly prestigious.

Her grin widened. “You’ll love it.”

Tracey pulled him into a hug and Draco lifted his arms before Pansy pulled him back so quickly he couldn’t remember if he actually managed to reciprocate or not.

“Have a good summer!” she grinned over her shoulder, bounding over to where a lost-looking woman was hovering by the exit to the muggle train station.

“Bye, Malfoy,” Vincent raised a hand and Draco nodded at him.

“Goodbye, Vincent.”

It was only later when he was making sure he hadn’t left anything at Hogwarts that he found himself starting to wonder when Davis had become Tracey and when Tracey had become his friend. With growing horror, he started to realise that Bulstrode and Crabbe weren’t exactly… Bulstrode and Crabbe anymore either.

He didn’t dislike it as much as he probably should have.

“Hobsy!” he clicked his fingers and a house elf appeared, sweeping into a deep bow.

“Yes, Young Master Malfoy?”

“What on earth is a burrito?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE COMMENTS AND KUDOS!!!!!! They really really make my day:)))))
> 
> hopefully the next chap will be quicker bc it's only one chara - guess who lol
> 
> this chapter was def meant to be one where you can slowly see where things start to go wrong
> 
> some quick fun facts:  
> \- originally, millie said yes to zabini bc I hadn't added in the divination section in the common room and it meant they became like bffs  
> \- there was a scene in the og draft where pansy introduces millie and draco to skeeter's animagus and they think she's gone crazy  
> \- One interesting line from the actual book is: '[Harry:] “I saw the Death Eaters! I can give you their names! Lucius Malfoy-” // Snape made a sudden movement, but as Harry looked to him, Snape’s eyes flew back to fudge.'
> 
> references:  
> \- scrimgeour does hunt nogtails in norfolk with cormac mclaggen’s uncle as said in HBP at the slug club. The caorthannach is described in Irish folklore as the mother of demons  
> \- crabbe is said to have a surprisingly soft voice before their final battle in the room of requirement in DH  
> \- Nabta Playa is a basin in the Nubian desert with alignments of stone that may have included a calendar circle indicating the direction of summer solstice sunrise. It's dated to around 7500 BC which is just so cool!!  
> \- Hippogriffs eating ferrets - harry and the gang see buckbeak eating them in Hagrid's hut in PoA  
> \- direct quote from ch15 of GoF: "'I will not," said Draco flatly. 'I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks.'  
> Hagrid's smile faded from his face.  
> 'Yeh’ll do wha’ yer told,' he growled, 'or I’ll be takin’ a leaf outta Professor Moody’s book … I hear yeh made a good ferret, Malfoy.'  
> The Gryffindors roared with laughter. Malfoy flushed with anger, but apparently the memory of Moody’s punishment was still sufficiently painful to stop him retorting."  
> \- Nurikabe - Japanese spirit manifests as an invisible wall but there's an illustration of it [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Torin_Nukaribe.jpg/800px-Torin_Nukaribe.jpg)  
> \- for the stars over the dragon and narcissus: the name Lucius comes from ‘lux’ - light and ‘lucere’ to shine (no actual constellation or star called Lucius apart from one on [‘staracle’](https://www.staracle.com/staracle/staracle.php?Tycho=10021349744) of which i’m not too sure of the credibility lol)  
> \- Millicent has a black cat confirmed in CoS when hermione tries to polyjuice into her  
> \- Marcus Turner is a Ravenclaw only mentioned in one of the extra's casting experience  
> \- Olive trees = peace and friendship  
> \- Uh yule ball outfits all accurate with a degree of creative license - Pansy’s ruffled pink dress, Draco’s velvet robes and Crabbe and Goyle in green.  
> \- the song is made up and has literally no deeper meaning, sorry lol  
> \- In the film, Moody's sitting with a ferret over his lap though it's said on the wiki that it's ‘sleeping’. in the book he's said to be dancing with prof. Sinistra, the astronomy one. i went with the ferret but there was a line of tracey gasping 'traitor!' at sinistra  
> \- Hyperion is Scorpius Malfoy’s middle name and refers to the titan of heavenly light who fathered the sun, moon and dawn. (Draco confirmed to have eagle owl in PS)  
> \- a ton of dialogue from the care scene w/grubbly-plank is also book canon but it's broken up so just know that if harry and draco are interacting, it's likely lifted from the book  
> \- The two gryffindors in care are dean and seamus, idk if that was obvious or not.  
> \- The weasleys walking past were meant to be fred and george - in HBP they open their joke shop including Pygmy Puffs which are puffskeins that have been specially bred to be tiny.  
> \- In the cursed child when they visit godric’s hollow draco’s all like “[yeah i can see why it's popular bc] look at the thatched roofs. And is that a farmers’ market?” and it was one of the only times i genuinely felt joy during that 4 hour play.  
> \- Afflicto - I shatter/break/weaken in Latin  
> \- for the [constellations](https://astronomynow.com/uk-sky-chart/) \- I used that (2020, late June at like 10pm)  
> \- curses can be hereditary so I headcanon that dark marks can kind of be felt by direct descendants

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr :)](https://prettylittlespirit.tumblr.com/)


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